How To Create a Custom Client Portal In ClickUp

As an agency, having to continuously update and send your clients notes, documents, reports, timelines in a list of completed deliverables can be a very time consuming and tedious process. This can also cause stress on account managers. It can eat into your profit margins and even take a hit on NPS ratings, especially if your work is all over the place and you don't have a central source of truth. But what if I told you that there was a solution and then you can build a central dashboard or portal for your clients and automate this whole process. You can send your clients one link and everything would be there for them. Hi, my name is Jeff Seifer and in this video I'm going to be walking you through, step by step how you can build out a client portal inside of ClickUp. Let's get started. So let's jump into ClickUp here. And yes, this is a question that we get asked all of the time. How do we create a client portal that can be very automated and just give clients what they need all the time without me having to touch a lot of the process here? So the first thing that you need to know is within this there are essentially three different ways that you can create a client portal or a dashboard. So the first way that you can choose to do this is by creating a list that you're going to share with your clients. And so for this, if I'm in Troop Farms in this folder here, I go to Shrut Farms Zenpilot. This list is something that I can essentially add, add one of my clients in as a guest. So if I come here sharing your permissions, I can add them as, as a guest into that list and they'll be able to see everything in that list. So the views in there, if there's any documents, if there's any tasks. So that's a great way for you to collaborate with your clients. However, that's going to take a little bit more work. You're essentially going to have to utilize the tasks in multiple list feature. So if I wanted them to see this task right here, I can come here, I can take it. And then I would go to move tasks and then I would have to move them into that and just make sure that they're move and keep a current list. So I'm utilizing that feature and ClickUp of keeping tasks and multiple lists there and that way you can then have them living in your list where they're actually being worked out of and then in here for your clients to see. So your first option is to create that Public list for clients. Option number two is going to be creating a client facing dashboard. So this is a common one that people like to use. Again, with this dashboard, I can't create a public view of this dashboard. And you have to invite your clients into this dashboard for them to see it. And then for some of this stuff, they're also going to need to have access to where these tasks actually live if they're going to have visibility into that. So there are some downsides to a dashboard. I typically lean towards creating that public list or my third option, which I'm going to go over in a second. But a dashboard is a nice way because there's great ways to have widgets. You can put a lot in here, a lot of customization capabilities. You just need to know that you need to invite them as a guest and then they need access to some of this stuff that you're actually showing them for them to see. So that's option A and B, option C, which I'm going to be focused on. And this one is great because it does not require them to be a guest at all. You don't need to invite your clients into ClickUp at all. You can essentially just set it up, create a public dashboard or a public doc with views in it that they can see. So if I come here into Dunner, Mifflin or actually let's go to Shrut Farms, this is where my example is. I'm going to be building another method. As you'll see here, I have this portal. This is a great way for me to just utilize a document that has everything I would need here from just intro text, I could have resources. So with some buttons here of scheduling a meeting, submitting a request, Google Drive progress report of completed or tasks that are ongoing, also completed projects that we've done for them, as well as some current analytics that I can put in here as well. And then also if I need to put any meeting notes and things like that. So essentially it's all in one location. And if I were to take this, I have this as a public document, I can take it, copy and paste it and then I would be able to see that publicly for my clients. So they have one link and they can see everything there. So that's what I'm going to focus on and how we can actually build that out for your clients. All right, so let's jump into this. So step one is obviously going to be the hierarchy. So a lot of my videos talking about the hierarchy because that is extremely important. You need to have the correct sort of hierarchy for agencies to actually build this out. So in this case we have a bunch of videos on that. I don't need to go into much detail, but the TLVR is essentially you need to have a space for all of your delivery work and then each client is going to need their own folder. That way all of your work for that client is going to be hosted in one location. So I'm going to have this folder and then I'm going to my list. There's a couple different ways that you can set up your lists. That's why we have a blueprint process at ZenPal to kind of walk you through that to make sure we get those all set up correctly. That's where there are some customization capabilities that you can do almost some of this. So we want to make sure it's set up the right way. When in this essentially I can either have just a retainer list here or I can do more of a service line specific lists. So right here what you need to do, I have this retainer XYZ list. I also have a review and strategy list more for some of my account management things like meetings and those kind of tasks. But in this retainer XYZ list I have all of my tasks that we're doing for Dunder Mifflin. So as you can see here, I have an ebook which is the paper manual. I have a blog post, top five types of paper. We're having a Google search campaign, paper suppliers meta campaign also sort of same thing, running those in tandem as well as a case study that we're doing for them as well. So a lot of work to be done here for Dunn Mifflin. Michael Scott is great client for us, but within this we need to make sure that Michael can actually see all this work as well as what we've done for them as well as what the results are for those pieces of content or our strategy that we've been putting together or some of those campaigns like our search campaigns, meta campaigns, things like that. So how do I set this up? So your first step is obviously again the hierarchy then actually getting our tasks in here, which I already have all that done. You can also use some custom fields and things like that. I'd recommend you watch our video. How to implement ClickUp for agencies can be super helpful for setting all this back end stuff up for this process. But what I'm going to do now is I'm going to start off by creating a document here at the folder level and I'm going to create it at this level because then I'm going to be able to see everything that's underneath the Dunder Mifflin folder. So if I come here, what I want to do is I want to go add and then I'm going to come here, create a doc view, just like that. We're going to add a document, very easy. I can go blank page and you can really name this whatever you want. So this is where you get a lot of customization. But let's say for this example, I'm just going to do Dunder Mifflin portal. Now what I want to do, let's get a little creative. We can go and add a cover photo to this. So if I want to just upload something very easy, I'm just going to grab a Dunder Mifflin cover image that I've created and drop it into there. So this is something that you can just create in Canva. If you create a Canva template, you can make this way easier for this whole process. So for this one, I just have our logo, Dunner Mifflin's logo, your marketing hub with a little arrow. And then if you want to put a picture of your account manager saying hi or something like that, just to make a little bit more personal, do whatever you want. But that's just a great way to, to make this just a little bit nicer in our little portal that we have here for Brendan Mifflin. And then in this we're able to create a little intro text. If you want to put a loom video here, just kind of saying hi to them, whatever it may be, make it very custom for them because it's going to just make the experience a little bit better. But for this example, let's just go ahead and create some very general intro text, which in this I'm just going to take to save us some time. I'm just going to take this information here from True Farm. So here I just have a little high team. I'm going to go ahead and just copy and paste this. You can also create a template. If you create this as like the bare bones here and I get sort of the overview with all the headers and things like that. I can come here and take this and I can save it as a template and saving that as a template, I can take that and then deploy it in all the other locations that I needed just to get me started. So again, if I wanted to have all the headers, all the base text in there, I don't need everything else that's super customized for each client. But if I just want to get the bare bones in there, save as a template, that's going to save me a ton of time. That's what I like to start off with. Then if you want, you can do a table of contents if that would be helpful. Just as you get a bunch of different sections in there. But for this I don't have too much. I'm not going to do that. But let's just say our first section is going to be focused more on let's say resources. So I'm going to do. Let's do H2. Just like that, we can do resources and if you want, you can add an icon to this. I can also turn this into more of a banner. Let's say we wanted a green banner like that. And then I can add this. Let's do a book emoji. I think that's pretty good for resources. That way it just looks a little bit nicer like that. We can do it. And then you'll double space or double enter there to get out of your banner. And then I go into this and for this resources, if I want to do a little intro text as well. But this one, I really want to have certain buttons for them to access certain things. So with this I can come here and we're going to do use our slash command button. And in this, let's say that this one is book a call. So maybe we just want to give them an option to easily book a call with us. I can then go in, enter my link. This link essentially would just be my calendar link for the account manager or whatever that may be. Let's just for the example, I'm just going to do this so that the button shows up. But I would go in here and I would add in my calendar link. If that's the case, I'm going to go add a button. So they have one to book a call. Let's say another button could be submit a thug or submit a request. And this could be then a link to a ClickUp form. So I could take a ClickUp form and I could put it in this button so that they have an easy way to go and just click on that and they have a form for them to fill out. Again, it's all in one place for them. They don't have to go find that form elsewhere. There's have one link where all this portal is going to live. Now I'm going to come here when add that button so now we have book a call, submit a request, and then let's say we have a Google Drive that has sort of all of the deliverables and assets that they have, that this is shared amongst us both. So we want to make sure that it's easy for them to get to that as opposed to again them having to go a different link. It's all right here. So we're going to go running another button and let's just say Google Drive and I have to add a URL in there. So for example, just use Empowered to come sort of override that. So now we have a couple different options for them to choose from. They can either book a call, they can submit a request, or they can find their Google Drive and I can move this around a little bit just like that. But now we have sort of our different buttons that they're going to need to see. And so there's obviously ways to make this a little bit better. We could add some intro text to this. I could edit these buttons, I could put on some emojis in these, I could make them all caps, things like that, just to make a little bit nicer. So feel free to customize this any way you want. Or if there's different buttons that you would need, you can put those in as well. But that's really the first part is just kind of getting those resources, so having them quick links for them to kind of go from place to place to make sure again, one spot for them to come and then they can go to booking a call, submitting a request, seeing their Google Drive or things like that. So that's really the first section that we're going to want in this. After that, the next one I like to put in is a progress report. So there's a few different things that we're going to set up here. So for this one, let's go and we're going to do a pretty similar to what we have above. We can do a banner here, I'll do a green banner, and this one is going to be a progress report. So essentially this is going to be all of the things that we're working on. They're not done yet, but we want them to see all the things that we're doing. So I'm going to come here. Let's take that, let's add in a little graph like that. I think that's a good emoji for it. I also need to make this a little bit bigger. Let's make this an H2 as well. And Then double enter there. And now we need to actually set up this view for them to see all this stuff. And then we're going to embed it into this section right here. And so this is where it starts to get a little bit tricky, but honestly not too tricky. We just need to create essentially a view of all of our tasks that are being done. So what you're going to do is you're going to create this here at the folder level. Again, we want to make sure we're seeing this across all of our lists here. So within the ClickUp hierarchy, if I create a view at the folder level, that means I can see work in this list and this list. So if you have more than just these two lists and there's basically your service lines like I have in this Vance Refrigeration, if it's in this structure, this will make it super helpful to to have all of those in one spot rather than creating a bunch of different views. So if I come here to the Dunder Mifflin folder, I'm in this document. What I need to do is go add a view. And so the big thing to note here is that a list view I believe or I feel looks super nice for this. You get a nice like progress bar that shows you essentially 0 to 100%. However, with a list view, there's not a great way to make it so that they can't see all the subtasks. So if I set up my structure here in Retainer XYZ list here, if I have my parent tasks as my deliverables, and that's really the only thing I want them to see. I just want them to see this. Maybe the due date, maybe the status and then maybe a progress bar. I can create that in a list view. But they're always going to have the ability to then see the subtasks or click into a task, there's not a great way to hide all of that. So if you don't want them to see all of the nitty gritty details, you're going to want to create a table view because that allows you to hide the subtasks. So again, they can only see these parent task items. I'll just see the deliverable. They're not going to see all the nitty gritty details that you're working on across your agency. So if I come here, what I want to do is I want to go to add and I'm going to do a table view. We'll see it right there. Go add the table and Then this is just going to create a list with sort of the basic columns and settings that are added here. So as you'll see here, we need to do some customization. Essentially what we're trying to do is show them only the tasks that are still open that we're working on. Show them status, due date, maybe priority, if you want that, if you use that and any sort of additional things you'd want to put into this view. But here I need to edit this a little bit. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make this task name a little bit bigger there so we can see all these. Also, you'll notice here subtasks, this is what we want to keep turned off. So if I turn it on, we're going to see all the subtasks here. Turn it off so that they can't see all the nitty gritty details. I don't need assignee on this. I'm going to hide the column status. That's perfect. We have our due date here. I don't need the priority. The other item that I'm going to want is I can come over here to add a column and I'm going to go here and I'm going to add this progress bar. If you don't have this here, I can go to new column and you can come type in progress or you'll see it's right there. We either have progress manual or we have progress auto. Auto essentially just bases it off the subtasks that are completed. So if I'm seeing this parent task as I complete my subtasks, that progress bar is going to fill up. Progress manuals, essentially you're going to have a slider and you're going to be able to slide it across to sort of show that progress. So this one's going to have manual effort. This one's going to be very automated just based off your subtasks. So after that add my progress bar and that's what I want. That's perfect. That'll just show them, hey, this one's 50% of the way done, this one, zero, so on and so forth. In addition, if you want, you can group by certain things. If you have custom field like us, we have work categories. So if you want to split that up and sort of this is your inbound services, your paid social, your paid search, I'll be able to do that as well. Just to sort of group things if you want to make a little bit nicer. So it's not all one Section that's sort of a great way to edit your view there. You also want to make sure that closed is not being shown. And if I want to do this, I can kind of customize it a little bit more. So as you'll see you have a bunch of different options to kind of come here. I like to adjust this row height, I like to make it medium just so there's a little more space in this. That way it's not all clumped together, it's super small. But that's sort of your way that you're going to go and create this nice view for them. Again, you can customize this, you can add additional custom fields if you want for them, but I think this is a great way to do it. If you want to show them the time track across these things, you can. It really just depends on if you want to do that or not. However, so much detail you want to add into this. Now I'm going to come here, I need to make sure I name this. So I'm going to name this one deliverable progress just like that, make sure my R is not capitalized and then we'll take this. And what I need to do now is I need to go in sharing and permissions. Share this link with anyone, copy the public link and then what I'm going to do, go back to where is my under method portal. There it is. Let's pin that so it's easy to find. Then you can come in here. Progress report I can go embed just like this. Embed any website if you want, share that, piece it in there. And now as you'll see, we have a nice view of all of this information. So I can either do that or I can just come in here and embed a ClickUp list just like that. So feel free to do it the way that you want. But for this example, I'm going to just leave it like this. So that way now they'll be able to see sort of all of their different options. I can also make this a little bit bigger if I want to. That way they can easily see it. But as you'll see now we have our options or our ways of seeing sort of all the things that we're doing for them. So that's going to show them all the tasks or sort of all the deliverables that you're working on for them as an agency. And after that's done, what we need to do next is we need to show them sort of what we've actually completed so after that we're going to come in here and we're going to go start creating sort of another header. So let's start with this. We're going to do completed projects just like that. Let's turn this into a banner like we've had in the other ones. Turn into banner, green banner. We'll do completed projects. Let's do a little check mark on this one. Just like that. And that's perfect. Again, if you want to do a little intro of what this is, so I can just say like, hey, this is a completed project from last month. I can also make sure I just do last month or I can do a larger time. I'll show you how to do that. But now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and I need to create another view. So let's just take this to make it a little bit faster to this deliverable progress view. I can come here, I can take this. And again, instead of creating another view from scratch, what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate this as another table view and that's just going to show it as a little progress. Typically we'll say copy, but let's just say this one is now completed. So just like that. So now I have my completed deliverables as well as my open deliverables as well. So this one, obviously now I need to change some of these. I'm going to leave it sort of the same framework of group by work category, keep subtasks, turn off. But now what I can do is I can come into my filters and so now I can say when the status is closed, just like that, confirm. As you'll see now we're only going to see the tasks or the deliverables that we've actually closed. And so you can keep that progress bar if you want. Obviously it's always going to be 100%. But if you wanted to to get rid of that, you don't necessarily need that because they're all going to be 100%. If you wanted to, you can also add in when status is closed. So in addition to that, if you wanted to, as I was mentioning earlier, if you want to be able to come in here and just show the, the deliverables that were completed in the last month, I can come here and I can do dates. The closed is in the last month, so I can go in there, I can make a little bit more custom. If you don't want to show them, say you've been Working with them for a year and you don't want to show them every single deliverable. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. But I can just go in here, I can choose last quarter, last month, whatever it may be. That just gives me the option. Just note that that's going to automatically adjust once you enter into sort of the new quarter of the new month. So just be cognizant of that. But for this I can just say let's do just the ones that were closed last month again. So that's going to show me that none of them show up. Maybe let's just do this month and see when those were closed. So there we go. Now we're just showing the ones that were closed in August. So that makes it super helpful for me. Once we hit September, these will kind of disappear. We'll just do the September ones. But that's just your option to customize a little bit further. So what I can do now, again, sort of same process, we're going to go to sharing in permissions, share the link with anyone, copy the public link, come here to my Dunder Mifflin portal, scroll down to the bottom and we're going to go into completed projects. And now I'm going to do embed. Whoops. We're going to embed any website again, bottom just like this and paste that. So now again, we have our completed projects, we have our progress report of projects that are not closed but we're working on and we have our resources. So that's sort of the main three that we're going to want to have. And then after that, again, you can adjust the settings, do whatever you want with that makes it super easy for them to see completed projects. And so after that, another big thing you want to add is obviously the analytics. So you are doing this, you've done that. And now what are the results of sort of the services and the deliverables that you've been providing for them. So we need to make sure that we show them that our strategy is really paying off here. So what you're going to want to do is now again, we can follow the same process. We can add in this, we're going to do current analytics and I can add in my emoji again, I can add in my banner, just to make this look a little bit nicer. We'll do another sort of graph type thing that looks great. And what I can do now is depending on what you're doing, whether you have data box or some other sort of solution, maybe you bring in data into Looker Studio or something like that, you're able to then embed sort of non ClickUp things into this. So I can come here and let's say I want to embed a data box report. I can easily grab something just like this and we're going to embed that there. And so this allows me to see sort of from what we've done, what has happened. So these are just Google Analytics here, but again you can pull in any sort of report that you want. That way they're going to be able to see again the current deliverables, completed projects as well as the results that you've sort of driven from your strategy for them. So you want to make sure all three of those sections are in there as well as the quick links. That's going to make it super easy for them to find everything that they need. And so after that, another thing that I would recommend, if I come here to the top, you'll see I have this option to add a page. So we have our main portal here, but let's say we want to add in meeting notes or other things like this. I can come here, do meeting notes and then if I want to, in ClickUp Docs you have the option to create a lot of sort of sub docs underneath that. So if I want to group this up by quarter or year, depending on how long you've had this client for, I can come in here and let's just say I want to do Q3:23 and then I can come into this and I can add in all the meeting notes that I've had at all, sort of those weekly or bi weekly standups with them. So I can come here and I can just put a date on all these. And then again if you, if you want to put all your meeting notes from those meetings, you can put them directly near. That way it's easy for them to find. Or if you just want to have a summary that you put in these as well, it's super helpful. It just makes it way easy to keep either a summary of your notes or talking points or things like that. That way you capture sort of give a good hierarchy and structure there so that they can easily find things and you're able to search too. So it makes it super easy. I can search for things even when it's a public document, makes it great for the client, a good sort of client experience here. So after that's done, the only other thing that you need to do once you get this all ready to go and edit it and looks all nice and pretty and we have all of our sort of views in here. All I need to do now, now that I've created those public views is I can come here and create this document as a public document. So I'm going to do is I'm going to go into sharing of permissions, follow the same exact process that we've done before. So now you'll see here as I switch my screen, I'm able to take the link from this by going to sharing permissions again, copy this public link and I'm going to go into my browser, paste this just like that. And then as this loads, we now have a nice portal for our customers. So as you can see over here we have the Dunder Mifflin portal. If you want to get rid of your little face here and last updated, you can, I'll show you that in a second. As you'll see here, I have my little intro, I have my resources, I have my progress report of everything we're doing, I have my completed projects and I have my current analytics as well as the option for them to see all this information over here with my meeting notes broken down, my specific meeting, specific quarter and things like that. So again, super easy for them to have everything they need. They can search for things up here and now you have one link for them to go find everything they need. But really when you're creating all these out, the world is your oyster. You have a lot of different options. You can customize it any way you want, a lot of different settings within these documents. You can add in additional things over here if you want, make a little bit prettier than I did here, add in emojis and things like that to these buttons, make these different colors. So really a lot of different options that you have. But that's how you create a client portal in ClickUp. And there you have it. That's how you build out a client portal inside of ClickUp. Taking your operation seriously will change your life and I want you to experience this life changing impact. So whether you're looking to boost productivity, increase profits, improve team health, or just create a system that runs without you so that you can essentially go on vacation once in a while. We're here to help. 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