For the client who pays you

The client portal
for your customer.

Unibuild's client portal is construction software for UK contractors and FM firms that gives each customer a login, in your name, logo and colours, to their own projects. They read the programme, approved photographs, day works, RAMS, drawings, registers and certificates, and stop ringing your office for documents.

See the client portal in a demo → Ask for a quote

Client viewing their project portal on a laptop

What it replaces

Without a client portal, your office
is the bottleneck between your client
and information you already hold.

Every one of these is a document that exists, in your system, that your customer has to ask somebody for.

A construction customer portal, which most firms call a client portal and some a contractor client portal, is the part of your own system you open to the customer who pays you: their projects, their evidence, their programme. It is the opposite direction of travel from the subcontractor portal, which is the account you give the firms working for you. Subcontract orders, subcontractor invoices and subcontractor payments do not appear on any client surface.

Monday

The client emails asking for the RAMS again. The version they were sent in March is on a laptop belonging to somebody who left.

Re-sent

Quarterly

The asset register goes out as a spreadsheet attachment. Their copy and yours diverge within a fortnight.

Two versions

Friday, every week

The client rings to ask how it is going. Your contracts manager sends four photographs he happened to be sent himself.

An hour a week

The alternative

Somebody adds the client to the site WhatsApp group. Your staff stop speaking freely in it that afternoon.

The channel dies

Six months on

A different person at the client asks for the service certificate. It was definitely issued.

Searched for

Weekly call

Fifteen minutes establishing what is actually happening on site next week, before the meeting can start.

Every week

The mechanism The portal is built on the same records the contract runs on So there is nothing to maintain

ProjectsProgrammeProgress photosDay worksCall-out requestsRAMSConstruction phase planDrawingsMaintained assetsFire assetsScan any QRTesting and calibrationQuotationsOur teamHealth and safetyFeedback ProjectsProgrammeProgress photosDay worksCall-out requestsRAMSConstruction phase planDrawingsMaintained assetsFire assetsScan any QRTesting and calibrationQuotationsOur teamHealth and safetyFeedback

What your client sees

Six of the seventeen client portal areas,
and why each one removes a phone call.

You choose which of the areas each individual contact gets, and which projects they can open. Both are set per person rather than per company.

Scoped project
by project

Access

A client contact sees only the projects you tick for them. Access is checked twice on every page, against the assignment list and against the project's client record.

A regional manager and a site caretaker see different things
Assign nothing and they see nothing
Repeated on every document download
Repeated again on every mobile call

Per person, not per companyLive

Approved
photographs only

Control

Nothing reaches the client automatically. Every upload starts at pending, and a member of your office staff opens it full screen and approves it before the client can see anything.

Your engineer photographs the mess freely
The approval records who released it and when
Grouped by visit, with your remark underneath
230 of 438 uploads released, 208 held back

The control is real and usedLive

Certificates
on demand

Docs

Maintenance reports, F-Gas records, fire door records with signatures and photographs, permits, accident reports, calibration certificates and quotations, all printable from their own login.

Generated from the live record, not a stored copy
Available at eleven at night without ringing anybody
The client produces it in their own name at audit
One record, or every record for one asset

Self service, gatedLive

Call-outs raised
by the client

Write

They describe the fault, attach photographs, add their own reference and submit. It lands in your unassigned queue badged as client raised.

A nominated operations distribution list is emailed
They get written acknowledgement with the reference
Nothing sits in one person's inbox
They can see their own open requests

One of two write pathsLive

Your team, with
their tickets

Trust

Show the client which qualified engineers are on their account, with their training matrix entries and e-learning records.

On each asset service, the engineer who actually attended
Their qualifications and when they expire
You choose who is showcased
Answers the competence question before it is asked

A tender assetLive

The four week
programme

Plan

A read only look ahead of tasks, locations, durations and assigned staff, drawn from the same planner your office works in.

The weekly call starts from a shared picture
No separate report to build
Marked as view only on their screen
Their project only

Fifteen minutes backLive

The design decision

Your client can write exactly
two things. That is a feature,
not a limitation.

A portal that lets a customer edit an asset, alter a programme or approve a photograph is a portal that will eventually cause an argument you cannot win. Unibuild's is read mostly on purpose.

They can raise a call-out request: Which writes a real call-out row at unassigned status, flagged as client originated, with their attachments and their own reference, and emails your operations distribution list. It is a request, not an instruction: your office still assigns it.
They can submit feedback: A structured form against a specific project, stored with a generated reference, emailed to your team with the ratings colour coded so a director can see a red chip before reading a paragraph.
That is the entire list: There is no other write path in the client portal or the client app. Assets, programmes, photographs, documents and project details are read only to them. When a client asks what they can break, the answer is nothing.
Which is why it is safe to be generous: Because the write surface is two forms wide, you can afford to show a client a great deal. That is the trade the design makes, and it is the reason the portal wins tenders rather than creating incidents.

Client portal design showing read-only access with two write paths

Put plainly A window, not a key And they can tell the difference

Facilities manager at a desk reviewing records

230Photographs released to clients

244Fire door records they can print

376Maintained assets they can read

Counted in the construction deployment, July 2026. The client portal is in daily service and is available in any deployment.

Where the value actually lands

It wins the tender before
it saves you the phone call.

01At tender stage: A panel asking how you will keep the client informed can be shown a working construction client portal with the project, the programme, the RAMS, the construction phase plan, the asset register and the fire door records already in it. Because the portal is built on the records the contract will actually run on, the demonstration is not a mock up.
02At renewal: When a framework is audited or handed to a new client representative, the evidence is already assembled per project and per asset. Nobody rebuilds a folder. For FM contracts in particular, this is the single strongest argument the platform makes.
03Every week in between: The documents a client habitually telephones for are behind their own login, and because access is enforced per project through the assignment table, your office does not have to check anything before the client can help themselves.
04When something goes wrong: The service history names the engineer who attended and opens that engineer's accreditations and training records with their expiry dates. A client questioning who was sent gets an answer rather than a promise to look into it.
05What it costs you to run: Nothing ongoing. The portal is a filtered view of records your team maintains anyway, so there is no synchronisation step, no separate database and no possibility of the client seeing a stale figure. The monthly report you build today is a snapshot somebody has to assemble. This is the live record.

Three logins, three audiences

Which portal did you mean?

People searching for a construction portal usually want one of three different things, and this page covers only the first. They are separate logins with separate audiences and separate data, not three views of one screen.

Client
portal

This page

The login you give the customer who pays you. Their projects, programme, approved photographs, asset registers, drawings and certificates, almost all of it read only. Also searched for as a construction customer portal or a contractor client portal.

Your branding, not ours
Scoped per person, not per company
Nothing about your subcontractors appears on it

Who logs inYour client

Subcontractor
portal

Supply chain

The login you give each firm working for you. The orders you approved, the invoices they raise against them, what has been paid and what is outstanding. Used by contractors and facilities management firms.

One account per subcontractor
They see their own orders and nothing else
Stops the chasing calls on a Friday

Who logs inYour subcontractors

Office
system

Own staff

Not a portal for an outside party at all. It is the back office your desk staff work in all day, granted page by page per person, and it is where the records the other two portals publish are actually made.

Your staff, not an outside party
Permissions set page by page
The source of everything the portals show

Who logs inYour office

Questions

The ones asked before
a client portal goes live.

What is a construction customer portal?

It is a login you give the customer who pays you, showing their own projects and nothing else: programme, approved photographs, drawings, registers, certificates and day works. The words client portal and customer portal get used for the same thing. What matters is the direction. This one faces the customer who commissioned the work. The account you give the firms working for you is the subcontractor portal, and the two never see each other. Subcontract orders, subcontractor invoices and subcontractor payments appear on no client surface at all.

I need a client portal for construction projects. What should I use?

A portal that reads the records your contract already runs on, so there is nothing separate to maintain. Unibuild's client portal gives each customer contact a login to the projects you assign them, in your firm's branding. They read the four week programme, approved photographs, RAMS, drawings, asset registers and certificates, and print certificates themselves. Photographs reach them only after your office approves each one. They can write exactly two things: a call-out request and project feedback. It is in daily service and available in any Unibuild deployment.

Can a client see anything belonging to another client?

No. Every client account is bound to one client company and to a specific list of projects. Each page checks both conditions before returning anything, and the same checks are repeated on every document download and on every mobile call. A client with no projects assigned sees an empty portal rather than everything.

What can a client actually change?

Two things: they can raise a call-out request and they can submit feedback on a project. There is no other write path anywhere in the client portal or the client app. Assets, programmes, photographs and documents are read only to them. That constraint is deliberate and it is the reason you can afford to be generous with what you show them.

Our clients are not going to log into another system. Is this wasted effort?

No. The people who use it first are the ones who generate the most work for your office. That means the facilities manager chasing certificates, the responsible person collecting fire door evidence and the site caretaker reporting faults. Once those three use it, the calls stop. The portal also earns its place at tender stage whether or not the client logs in afterwards.

We already send our clients a monthly report. Why change?

The monthly report is a snapshot that somebody has to build. The portal is the live record, so it costs nothing to maintain and it is never out of date. Most contractors keep the report and use the portal to answer everything that arrives between reports, which is where the hours actually go.

Can we control what each client contact sees?

Yes, at two levels. You tick which projects the contact may open, and you tick which of the seventeen areas appear in their menu. Both are set per user rather than per company, so a regional manager and a site caretaker at the same customer can have entirely different portals.

What happens to the documents we have already issued?

Files already held against a project in Unibuild appear in the portal immediately. Historic documents held elsewhere are loaded during implementation into the relevant project folders. We agree a cut off date with you, and the migration is included in the fee.

Would our clients get the portal, or is it only in certain deployments?

They would, included in the one monthly fee at no extra cost. The client portal is available in any Unibuild deployment and is live today, with client accounts assigned across real projects. What gets built around it is yours: which projects a client can see, which photographs you release to them, which registers and certificates they can read, and who signs each of those off. Nothing reaches a client until somebody named has approved it, and that approval route is configured to how you work. Anything else you need is built for you, and changes asked for after go-live are included in the monthly fee. That is how bespoke construction software works here.

Does the portal look like ours, or like yours?

Yours. The whole platform is built for your firm, so the portal your client signs into carries your name, your logo and your colours, and so does the office system behind it. There is an optional branded client app to go with the portal. Like your staff app, it is published under your company name and icon on the App Store and Google Play, so what your customer downloads is your app. Both apps and their store publishing are included in the one monthly fee, at no extra cost.

Is this the same thing as the subcontractor portal?

No. They are two separate surfaces for two different companies. The client portal is for the customer who pays you, and it is read mostly: their projects, their programme, their approved photographs, their asset registers and their certificates. The subcontractor portal is for the firms working for you, and it covers the orders you issued them and the invoices they raise against those orders. Subcontract orders, subcontractor invoices and subcontractor payments do not appear on any client surface, so the two never meet.

The platform