How to give clients a portal in Dspatch

Commercial cleaning happens when the client is gone. A medical office locked at 6 PM, an office suite empty by 8, a warehouse floor after second shift closes. The client never sees the crew work, never watches a trash liner go in or a restroom get wiped down. They see the result in the morning. If something is missed, trust drops before you hear about it.

The Dspatch client portal closes that gap. Each customer gets a login where they see every completed visit: the date, the crew, GPS check-ins and the photos your checklist required. They see their invoices, pay by card, and authorize automatic payment if they want recurring service to charge a saved card. The portal is not a marketing channel. It is operational proof delivered the morning after service.

This is how to give clients a portal in Dspatch, step by step, and what it does to retention when you run it consistently.

Turn on the portal for a customer

Go to Customers and open the customer record. In the Portal Access section, toggle it on. Dspatch generates a secure link and sends an email to the primary contact inviting them to set a password. They click through, choose a password, and log in.

If the contact does not receive the email, check the address in the contact record. Resend from the same Portal Access section. The link does not expire, but it works only once. After the client sets a password, they log in at the portal URL with their email and that password.

Turn the portal on before the first completed visit. The client sees proof from day one. If you are onboarding dozens of accounts and need to get crews running first, turn it on within the first billing cycle. Clients who see a portal invitation in the same week as the first invoice understand what they are paying for.

Who sees what

Each customer record can have multiple contacts. The one marked primary gets the portal invitation. Once they log in, they see all sites under that customer, every completed visit, every invoice. If a client manages six buildings under one contract, they see all six in one login.

A contact can be portal-only: they get login access but no other emails. Use that for a facilities director who wants to review work but does not need to be copied on scheduling changes or billing reminders.

What the client sees inside

The portal opens to a visit history: a list of completed jobs with the site name, the date, the crew member who checked in and the time. Each visit is a row. Click into one and the client sees the GPS check-in location on a map, the check-out time, any notes the crew left and every photo required by the checklist.

Photos matter more than the list. A lobby shot showing the floor mopped and the trash pulled. A restroom with the dispenser refilled. A break room counter wiped down. The client did not watch it happen, but they see it happened. That gap between expected and verified closes.

The invoices section shows every invoice: draft, sent, paid. The client clicks one and sees which visits it covers, with the date of each. If they authorized a card on file, the payment posts automatically when you mark the invoice ready. If not, they pay from the invoice screen with a card or record a check payment if you allow it in settings.

The portal also holds a saved card if the client added one. They can update it themselves when it expires. They control whether it charges automatically for recurring work. You cannot pull a payment without releasing an invoice first.

Proof of service on a repeating schedule

The portal makes the most difference on recurring work. A building serviced three nights a week generates twelve to thirteen visits a month. Without a portal, the client gets one invoice at month-end listing those visits. With a portal, they log in any morning and see last night's check-in with photos. Proof arrives before the question forms.

Checklists drive that proof. In Job Checklists, build a template for each site that requires a photo of the areas the client watches: restrooms, lobby, break room. Mark those line items photo required. When the crew opens that visit in the app, they cannot mark it complete until the photo uploads. The portal pulls those photos through within minutes of check-out.

We see this across the companies on Dspatch. The ones that require photos on recurring night work keep clients longer. Not because the work is better, but because the client does not wonder whether it happened.

How to let clients pay by card in Dspatch

Card payments run through Stripe. In Settings, connect your Stripe account or create one if you do not have it. Dspatch walks through the connection. Once linked, every invoice you send includes a Pay Now button. The client clicks it from the portal or from the invoice email, enters a card, and the payment clears in one business day.

They can also save a card in the portal and authorize automatic charging. You control that in Rules. Turn on Auto-Charge for Recurring Services, and every recurring invoice posted charges the saved card the same day if the client opted in. One-off work still requires manual approval unless you invoice it and they pay from the portal.

Stripe takes a percentage. The typical range is 2.9% plus thirty cents per transaction for card-present and online payments. That comes out of your deposit, not the invoice total. The client pays the invoice amount. You receive that minus the fee.

How to import customers and sites into Dspatch

If you are moving from spreadsheets or another system, start with the customer import. Go to Customers, click Import and download the template. It is a spreadsheet with columns for customer name, billing address, site address, contact name, email, phone and site-specific access notes.

Fill one row per site. If a customer has four buildings, that is four rows with the same customer name and four different site addresses. Save it as CSV and upload. Dspatch reads the file, groups sites under each customer and creates the records. You review them before confirming.

Access notes and door codes go in the site record, not the customer record. The crew app shows those notes when they open the visit. If a back door code changes, edit the site. Every future visit picks it up.

After import, turn on portal access for the customers you want to give it to. You do not have to turn it on for everyone at once. Start with the accounts where clients ask the most questions or where the work is hardest to see, then expand as you confirm the workflow.

How to set up crew pay in Dspatch

Crew pay flows from completed visits. In Crews, add each crew member with their pay rate: hourly or per visit. Per-visit works for repeating jobs where the scope is consistent. Hourly works when visit duration varies or you bill by the hour.

When a crew member checks in and out on a visit, Dspatch logs the time. If they are paid hourly, that time multiplies by their rate. If they are per-visit, the visit pays the flat amount. Both land in Payables once you mark the visit completed.

Go to Payables to review what each crew member earned in the pay period. Approve the batch, and you can pay out through integrated services on the Pro and Enterprise plans or export to your payroll system. Dspatch does not file payroll taxes. You handle that part or send the export to your accountant.

Crew members see their pay in the app under Pay. They see visits worked, hours if applicable, the amount earned and whether it has been paid out. That transparency cuts the number of pay questions by half.

What the portal does to retention

Clients leave cleaning companies for two reasons. One is missed work that goes unreported until it is a pattern. The other is an invoice they do not remember authorizing because they never saw proof the work happened.

The portal handles both. A missed check-in shows up as a gap in the visit log. The client sees it before the next invoice. You hear about it while you can still send someone back that night. The invoice lists every visit by date, and the client clicked into half of them already to review photos. They know what they are paying for because they watched it accumulate.

Retention is arithmetic. If you lose one fewer account per quarter because proof arrived on time, that is four accounts a year still paying. A typical small commercial account runs anywhere from six hundred to two thousand dollars a month. Four accounts is real money. It costs you a checklist and a login.

Questions owners ask about the client portal

Can I turn the portal off for certain customers?

Yes. Portal access is per customer. Toggle it on for the accounts that want transparency or ask the most questions. Leave it off for the others. Some clients prefer a monthly invoice and a phone call when something is wrong. Let them work that way.

Do clients see draft invoices or only sent ones?

They see invoices you marked as sent. Drafts stay in your system until you release them. That gives you time to review line items, adjust for added work and confirm the total before the client sees it.

What happens if a crew forgets to take a required photo?

The app will not let them mark the visit complete until every required photo uploads. If they check out without finishing the checklist, the visit stays in progress and does not appear in the portal or on an invoice. You see the incomplete visit in Jobs and follow up with the crew to finish it or override it if the photo is not critical.

Dspatch is the new industry standard for commercial cleaning companies that send crews to buildings every night. Recurring schedules, a crew app with GPS check-ins and photo checklists, a client portal with proof of service, invoicing that flows from completed work, card payments through Stripe, crew pay and Coach Ken, the AI operating partner that reads your numbers and tells you what to fix. If you clean offices, medical facilities or industrial sites and want clients to see the work without you sending screenshots by text at midnight, join the waitlist.