Your client doesn't need a staff login to see their own project

A project has more people watching it than the firm's own staff. A client wants to know what's approved and what's still pending. A structural consultant needs the drawings relevant to their own scope, not the whole project archive. A contractor bidding on a tender needs the tender documents — and needs their bid kept sealed from competitors until it closes. None of them should need a staff-level login to get any of that, and none of them should have to email the office and wait.

Three portals, three different access shapes

A Client Portal login sees exactly their own project — approved drawings, issued invoices, transmittals that have actually gone out, mile stones as they're reached. Not draft documents, not another client's project, not the firm's internal notes. A Consultant Portal login is scoped to the engagement they're actually part of. A Contractor Portal login sees the tenders they've been invited to bid on, and nothing about a competing bid until the tender closes and every sealed submission opens at once — the same discipline a real tender process needs, enforced by the system rather than trusted to an inbox.

A login, not a seat

None of these are staff accounts. They don't count against a studio's own paid seats, and they don't get anywhere near the firm's own Office Hub — client-facing, consultant-facing, and contractor-facing access are each their own login, provisioned by the firm, scoped to exactly what that person needs to see. A firm isn't paying for "one more user" every time it wants a client to check their own project status without a phone call.

Sealed until it should be

The contractor tender flow is worth calling out specifically: a bid a contractor submits stays sealed — invisible to the firm and to other bidders — until the tender formally closes. That's not a UI convenience; it's the actual integrity of a competitive bid process, and it matters exactly as much in software as it does on paper. A tender system that lets anyone peek at bids early isn't really sealed at all.

What this replaces

Before something like this, "keep the client updated" usually means a PDF attached to an email, sent whenever someone remembers to send it, already stale by the time it's opened. A portal login means the client, consultant, or contractor is looking at the same live record the firm's own staff are — not a snapshot someone exported last week.

Managing external stakeholders on a project? Client, consultant, and contractor portal access all provision from inside your own AORMS Office Hub.