Step-by-step guides, common questions, and quick answers. All searchable, all in one place. The same content powers the help tab inside the app, so what you read here is what your team sees there.
New here? These steps walk you from sign-up to your first live project.
New to Portal Worx? Start by creating a project, adding your documents and photos, inviting your team, then building your first report. Try an AI summary once a project has content.
Sign up with Google, or with your email address, company name, and password. Email sign-ups get a verification link; Google sign-ups are verified already and have no password.
Create accountOnce verified, log in and open Account, then Administration. Upload your square and landscape company logos on the Branding sub-page.
Go to User Management in the sidebar to add people by email and assign a role. Workspace roles (Admin, User) are your own team; external roles (Collaborator, Client) are outside parties invited to specific projects and are free.
Start a new project with a name, location, dates, and progress, then assign users so the right users can see and work on it.
Upload files into categorised folders within a project. Set each category or folder's access - Workspace or Restricted for your team, plus optional external sharing - so the right people see the right files.
Build a polished, branded report from scratch or from a template, save your work as you go, then export it as a client-ready PDF.
It tracks workspace setup for the account owner. Steps tick themselves from your real data rather than from a 'seen' flag, and you can skip a step or hide the card.
Yes. Go to your Profile and click 'Restart' on the 'Restart walkthroughs' card. That re-arms every tour available to you and shows the in-form setup guides again.
Search across every article, or browse by category below.
Portal Worx uses AI in four places: 1. Project summaries: the AI Insights tab on each project turns its details, activity, documents, and more into a clear written summary. 2. Category and folder names: AI can suggest tidy, consistent names for your document categories and image folders. 3. Report templates: AI can help draft a report template so you are not building from a blank page. This one needs a Professional or Business plan. 4. Ask Scout: the assistant inside the Help Centre answers your how-to questions about Portal Worx. The first three use AI credits (1 credit each, except a Detailed project summary which uses 2). Ask Scout is free. All AI is processed by Anthropic's Claude models. See 'What are AI credits?' for allowances.
AI credits meter your use of AI. One credit equals one action: generating a project summary, generating a report template, or asking AI to suggest category or folder names each use 1 credit. The exception is a Detailed project summary, which asks for roughly four times the words and uses 2 credits. The Ask Scout help assistant does not use any credits. Each plan includes a monthly credit allowance that resets every billing cycle: Starter includes 50, Professional includes 500, and Business includes 3,000. If you run out, you can buy a top-up pack or upgrade your plan. See 'Can I buy more AI credits?'. Credits are not the only condition. AI report template generation also needs a Professional or Business plan, so a Starter workspace has 50 credits it cannot spend there. Project summaries and category or folder name suggestions work on every plan.
Open any project and go to the AI Insights tab, then click 'Generate Summary'. Before generating you can choose the length: Headline (two or three sentences), Concise, Standard, or Detailed. The summary is built only from content you can already see. Restricted documents, folders, reports, and message threads you cannot access are never included, so it is safe to generate. Your history shows only the summaries you generated yourself. Each summary uses 1 AI credit, except a Detailed one which uses 2. The cost is shown on each length option before you generate. Once generated you can copy it with its formatting intact, download it as a PDF at no extra credit, regenerate it, or open your past versions in the history, which also shows what has changed since the last summary. AI is on by default for Admins and can be granted to Users, Collaborators and Clients on a plan with the permission matrix. See 'What do the AI summary lengths mean?' for how to pick one.
Length is the only choice, and it controls how much is written: - Headline: two or three sentences. Where the project stands and anything urgent. - Concise: the short version, key points only. - Standard: a balanced read, enough detail to act on. This is the default. - Detailed: the long version, covering every part of the project in full. Every summary is written the same way regardless of length: plainly, with any genuine flags or risks stated rather than smoothed over. Whichever you pick, it is always built only from the content you personally have access to, and only you can see the summaries you generate.
When you're setting up document categories or image folders, you can ask AI to suggest names. Tell it your industry, how you like to organise your work, and any extra context, and it proposes a set of clear, consistently named options. The suggestions are just a starting point: nothing is created until you choose and confirm the names you want, and you can edit any of them first. Each generation uses 1 AI credit.
When building a report template, you can use AI to generate a first draft of the structure. Describe the kind of report you need and AI proposes sections and fields you can then edit in the template builder. This is a Professional and Business plan feature, the same gate as PDF export. On Starter the action answers with an upgrade prompt rather than a draft, even though the plan includes AI credits. Generating a template uses 1 AI credit. Once you are happy, publish the template and reuse it to create reports quickly. See 'How do report templates work?' for the full template workflow.
Open the Help Centre (the Help button) and use the 'Ask Scout' tab to ask questions in plain English, like 'how do I export a report?' or 'how do I invite a client?'. The assistant answers using Portal Worx's own help content, so its answers stay accurate to how the product actually works. Ask Scout is free and does not use any AI credits. If it cannot answer a question from the help content, it logs the question for our team so we can improve the help centre, and you can switch to the 'Support' tab for a human reply.
If you use up your monthly AI allowance, you can buy a top-up pack from the Billing page without changing plan. Two packs are available: Small (100 credits) and Large (500 credits). Top-ups are available on all paid plans. Top-up credits are valid for 12 months from the date of purchase. Your plan's monthly allowance is used first, then top-up credits. If you find you regularly need more, upgrading your plan may work out better than repeat top-ups.
The AI features that read project data, meaning project summaries, category and folder name suggestions, and AI report templates, are controlled by one 'Use AI Features' permission: - Superadmins always have AI access. - Admins have it on by default. - Users, Collaborators and Clients are off by default. Any of those defaults can be changed, but editing the permission matrix is itself a Professional and Business plan feature, so a Starter workspace runs on the defaults as they stand. Turning AI on for someone never bypasses access control: a summary they generate is built only from the content they can already reach, and each generation spends one of the workspace's AI credits. The Ask Scout help assistant is separate. It is free, available to everyone, and only reads the help articles, never your project data.
Each project captures the essentials: a name, a rich description, a location, and optional start and end dates (Portal Worx calculates the duration for you). A progress percentage lets you show at a glance how far along the work is. For anything specific to your business, add custom fields when you create or edit the project. Each custom field can be a text field, a date, a dropdown (with your own options), or a progress value, so you can model things like site reference numbers, permit dates, or job stages your own way. A project can also carry a header image and a location map.
A project is organised into tabs: - Summary: the project's details, progress, and assigned team. - Activity: a timeline of everything that has happened on the project. - Documents: files organised into categories. - Gallery: photos organised into folders. - Reports: reports that have been published and assigned to this project. - Messages: the project's message threads (see 'How do project message threads work?'). - AI Insights: generate an AI project summary. Only shown to people who can use AI. What each person sees within a tab depends on their role and on the access set on each category, folder, or report.
Open a project and use its assignments to add or remove people. Assigning someone gives them access to the project according to their role, and every assignment records who made it. External roles are the ones to remember: collaborators and clients never see anything by default and only get access to the specific projects you share with them, and they cannot see each other. For finer control within a project, use category and folder access (see 'How do I control who sees my documents?').
Access is set on the category (for documents) or the folder (for images), not on individual files, and whatever you set cascades to everything inside. Open the category or folder in the project's Documents or Gallery tab and choose 'Access Settings'. Each container has two independent audiences. Internal access, meaning which of your own workspace users can see it: - Workspace: every workspace user assigned to the project. - Restricted: only the workspace users you choose, either by role or by naming specific people. External access, meaning people outside your workspace (collaborators and clients): - Off by default. Externals see nothing here until you turn a switch on. - Share with all collaborators, share with all clients, or pick specific collaborators or clients instead. The two audiences are independent, so a Restricted item that is locked down internally can still be deliberately shared with a client or a collaborator. Changing access needs the 'Manage Access Settings' permission. Superadmins can always see restricted content for account administration.
Trash is your safety net for the five things that soft-delete: projects, reports, report templates, document categories, and image folders. Individual documents and images are not among them. Deleting one of those removes it straight away and it cannot be recovered, so archive it instead if you might want it back. Trash is not in the sidebar. Open it from your avatar menu at the top right, or from the account area under Storage. 1. Open Trash. 2. Find the item and click 'Restore'. You can select several and restore them together. After 30 days, items are permanently deleted by an automated cleanup job. Restoring is scoped to what you created. Anything you deleted, you can restore. Restoring someone else's item needs the "Manage All Users' Trash" permission, and superadmins can restore anything. The Trash list follows the same rule, so it shows your own items unless you hold that permission.
Documents: most common business formats are supported (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, plain text, CSV, and similar). For security, executable and script files are blocked. Each document can be up to 500 MB. Images: JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, BMP, TIFF, and AVIF. Each image can be up to 50 MB. SVG is not usable, even though it appears in the format list: every image upload is checked against the real contents of the file, and an SVG fails that check with 'does not appear to be a valid image'. Convert it to PNG first. Batches have one hard limit: the files in a single upload must total no more than 2 GB. The upload window also mentions 50 documents or 100 images as a comfortable batch size, but that is guidance rather than a rule, so a larger batch still goes through as long as it stays under the 2 GB total. Total storage is limited by your plan. You are warned by email at 80% and 90% usage, and an upload that would take you over 100% is refused until you free up space or upgrade.
Documents, images and reports each have a Comments panel where you can start a thread or reply to one. Projects themselves are not commentable: for project-wide conversation, use the Messages tab. Type @ followed by a person's name to mention them. They get an in-app notification, and an email as well unless they have switched that particular email off in their notification settings. You can only mention people who can already see the item, so a mention never hands content to someone without access. On a report, mentions reach internal workspace users only. Comments stay attached to the item and form part of its activity trail. A thumbs-up reaction is there for quick acknowledgement without adding another comment.
Archive is the right move when something is finished but you still want it on file, such as a closed project. Archived items are hidden from active views, stay reachable from the Archive page, and stop counting towards your plan's project and storage limits, which is the practical point of archiving. Delete moves the item to Trash for 30 days, after which it is gone for good. Archive covers more than Trash does. Projects, reports, document categories and image folders can go to either, and Archive additionally takes individual documents and images, which Trash never accepts. Report templates work the other way round: they can be moved to Trash but not archived. Restoring is not open to everyone. You can unarchive the items you created; unarchiving someone else's needs the "Manage All Users' Archive" permission, and superadmins can unarchive anything. You can also delete an item from the Archive page, which moves it into Trash and starts the 30-day countdown rather than destroying it on the spot. When you archive or delete a project, you choose what happens to its reports: include them so they move with the project, or detach them so they stay as general reports. As a rule: archive when the work is done, delete when it should not have existed.
Open a document's actions menu and choose 'View Reminders', or open the document and use the Reminders tab in the panel on the right, then 'Open reminders'. To schedule one: 1. Fill in 'Reminder Title' and, if useful, 'Custom Message (Optional)'. 2. Set 'Scheduled Date' and 'Scheduled Time'. 3. Choose 'Recurrence': One Time, Daily, Weekly or Monthly. Recurring reminders can carry an 'End Date (Optional)'. 4. Pick recipients: 'Remind Me', 'Everyone with access', or 'Specific users'. Tick 'CC me' to copy yourself. 5. Click 'Create Reminder'. Recipients are filtered by access. Anyone who cannot open the document's category is skipped, and deactivated or pending users never receive one. Limits keep the noise down. A one-off sends once. A recurring reminder sends at most three times, or stops at its end date, and the table shows the count as '1 of 3'. A document can hold up to 10 active reminders. Every reminder shows a status of Active, Sent or Failed, and 'View Logs' opens the per-recipient delivery record. You can also edit a reminder, send a test to yourself, or use 'Send Now' rather than waiting for the schedule.
Documents, images and reports can each be shared with chosen people. Find 'Share' in the item's actions menu, or in the Share tab of the panel beside the item. In the modal: 1. Under 'Recipients', choose 'Everyone with access' or 'Specific users (default)' and tick the people you want. 2. Add a 'Message (Optional)' if you want to say why you are sending it. 3. Tick 'Send me a copy' to copy yourself. 4. Click 'Share'. Sharing sends the file itself, not just an alert that one exists. Recipients get an email with a secure download link and do not need to log in to use it. Only people who can already access the item are listed, and anyone without access is skipped, so sharing never widens who can see something. One thing to be clear about: the app confirms when the emails are sent, not when they land in someone's inbox. If someone says nothing arrived, check the Email Delivery Centre for the real delivery status and bounce reason (see 'Why didn't my client receive an email I sent?'). Two conditions apply to reports specifically. The report must be published first, and sharing a report is part of advanced reporting, so it needs a Professional or Business plan. Sharing documents and photos works on every plan.
Open any document, photo or report and it fills the screen as a split view: the item itself on the left, a tabbed rail on the right. What is in the rail depends on the item and on your permissions: - Comments: the thread on this item, including @mentions. - Reminders (documents): the active reminders, with a button into the full scheduler. - Share: send this item to chosen people by email. - Details: who created it, who owns it, and the access settings it inherits. - Access: a read-only list of everyone who can currently see it, with their role. Access itself is not set here. It belongs to the document category or the photo folder, and cascades to everything inside (see 'How do I control who sees my documents?'). Moving around: the title at the top is a picker listing every item in the same category or folder, and the arrows on either side of the viewer step to the previous or next one. The left and right arrow keys do the same, unless you are typing in a field. Drag the divider to resize the rail and the width is remembered next time. The collapse button tucks it away to icons. The address bar tracks whatever is open, so copying the URL sends someone straight to the same item.
Some roles can see every project in the list without being assigned to them. Open one of those and you get a locked page reading 'You don't have access to this project', because the project exists, you are simply not a member. Click 'Request access'. The button then locks and reports that your request is pending approval, and it stays that way across reloads, so you cannot fire duplicate requests by accident. Requesting never adds you to the project by itself. Every active superadmin is notified in the app and by email. To review requests, a superadmin opens Account, then Administration, then 'Access Requests', where 'Project Access Requests' lists who asked, for which project, and when. Each pending row has two actions: - 'Approve' adds the requester to the project straight away. - 'Decline' opens a confirmation with 'Reason (optional, sent to the requester)'. Either way the requester is told the outcome, so nothing sits silently. If you cannot see the project in your list at all, this is not the right article. That is a visibility question rather than a membership one, and someone who manages the project needs to assign you (see 'How do I control who's on a project?').
Most lists support multi-select. Tick the checkbox on each row, or the one in the header to take everything on the page, then use the actions that appear. What you get depends on where you are: - Projects: delete the selection, or 'Archive selected'. - Photo gallery: 'Download selected', 'Move to folder', delete, and archive when only folders are selected. - Manage Categories and Manage Folders: after 'Select All', set access for the selection, change their owner, archive them, or delete them. Applying access to a selection overwrites whatever those items had before, and you are warned first. - Trash: 'Restore selected items' or 'Delete selected items permanently'. - Archive: restore several items together. - Reminders: delete several at once. One behaviour is worth knowing. A row you cannot act on shows a disabled checkbox and is left out of select-all, so you can never assemble a batch the server would reject halfway through. In Trash, for example, restore is limited to items you created, and hovering explains it: 'You can only restore items you created'. Bulk actions that remove things still ask for confirmation, and deletions go to Trash for 30 days like any other delete.
Reports are always created in the Reports Centre, in your own 'My Reports' space, never directly inside a project. The 'New Report' button on a project's Reports tab is a shortcut: it takes you to the Reports Centre with the Create menu already open. 1. Open Reports Centre from the sidebar. 2. Click 'Create' and choose 'Build a custom report' or 'Create from a template'. 3. Give the report a title, then add and reorder blocks however you like. 4. Click 'Save'. The builder does not save on its own. Nothing you have typed is stored until you press 'Save', which is deliberate: saving is the moment you decide the work is worth keeping. The header tells you where you stand, showing 'Unsaved changes' while there is work in progress and 'All changes saved' once it is written. If you try to leave the page with unsaved changes, Portal Worx asks you to confirm first. When the report is finished, mark it Completed, then publish it. Only then can it be assigned to a project. See 'Can I create a report without a project?' for the full lifecycle.
The report builder offers a wide set of block types you can mix and reorder freely: - Text, number, and date fields - Images and image galleries, with a caption on each photo - Checklists and tables - Signatures (captured on screen with touch or mouse) - Location maps (embedded as static images) - Ratings, progress, and dropdown (select) fields Each block is independently editable, so you can build anything from a quick site checklist to a detailed inspection report.
PDF export is a Professional and Business plan feature. On Starter the action is offered but answers with an upgrade prompt instead of a file. Open the report and click 'Export PDF'. The file is generated on our servers, carries your workspace logo if you have uploaded one, and honours the report's conditional logic, so anything hidden by a rule stays out of the PDF. Drafts can be exported as well as completed reports, though Completed is the right state for anything you send on. Two things are worth knowing before you export: - The filename is fixed, not unique. It is built from the report's id and the date the report was created, so every export of the same report arrives under the same name and your browser adds (1), (2) and so on. - Nothing is kept. Portal Worx does not store the generated file and does not record the export anywhere, so there is no list of past exports to go back to and no entry on the activity trail. Save the file somewhere you can find it again. You can re-export at any time.
Build a report structure once and reuse it. From the report builder you can save a structure as a template, then publish it to share it with your workspace. Creating a report from a template copies its structure into a new report, so editing the template later never changes reports already made from it. Who can change a template is broader than you might expect. The author always keeps edit and delete on their own templates. Separately, the 'Manage Report Templates' permission covers acting on templates other people created, and it is on by default for Admins and Users, so any internal Admin or User can edit, delete, publish or unpublish a colleague's template. Collaborators are the exception: their permission only ever governs their own templates. See 'Who can see my report templates?'. AI can also draft a template for you on the Professional and Business plans (see 'Can AI help build report templates?').
A template's sharing is controlled by its status: - Draft: visible only to the person who created it, in 'My Templates'. Nobody else can open it, superadmins included. - Published: shared with everyone in your workspace who has template access, listed under 'Published Templates'. That includes collaborators, who can use published templates to build their reports. Editing is a separate question from visibility. The author always keeps edit and delete on their own templates, and the 'Manage Report Templates' permission, on by default for Admins and Users, lets a colleague edit, delete, publish or unpublish a template they did not create. Collaborators only ever act on their own. If you need a structure nobody else can change, keep it as a draft. You can also mark one template as the workspace default, pre-loaded whenever someone starts a new report. It has to be published first, and only workspace users can set it.
Conditional logic keeps reports relevant by reacting to what is entered. What a rule can do depends on what it is attached to: - On a section: Show or Hide. That is all a section supports. - On a field: Show, Hide, Require, or Make optional. Rules support comparisons like equals, does not equal, contains, is empty, is not empty, greater than, and less than. For example, 'if Pass/Fail equals Fail, show the Remedial Actions section'. Conditional logic controls visibility and whether a field is required. It does not perform calculations. Anything a rule hides is also left out of the PDF export.
Every report starts without a project, and there is no way around that: the builder refuses to create a report already inside one and tells you to complete and publish it first. The 'New Report' button on a project's Reports tab is only a shortcut into the Reports Centre. The lifecycle runs in four steps: 1. Create the report in the Reports Centre. It is a draft in your own 'My Reports' space and nobody else can see it. 2. Complete it. A project is not required for this. Completing finalises the content and starts the report's edit history, so every later change is recorded. The report still sits in your own space and nobody else can open it. 3. Publish it. This moves it into the shared Reports Centre, where the report's own access settings decide who else can see it. Publishing needs the report to be Completed, and only the author or a superadmin can do it. 4. Assign it to a project. Now it appears in that project's Reports tab. A report has to be published before it can be assigned, you need the 'Assign Reports to Projects' permission, and you can only file it into a project you can see. A report you never assign simply stays a general report in the Reports Centre. Detaching a report from a project is always allowed and puts it back there.
Reports are not locked. Two people can open the same report and edit it at the same time, and neither is stopped from working. What is protected is the save. When you save, your browser tells the server which version of the report you started from. If someone else has saved since then, your save is refused rather than quietly overwriting their work, and you see: 'This report was modified by another user or session. Reload the page to see the latest version before saving again.' Reload the page to pick up the latest version, re-apply your changes, and save. Your unsaved edits are not stored anywhere in the meantime, so copy anything long out of the builder before you reload. Once a report is Completed, every edit is kept in its history.
Publishing is what makes a report visible to anyone but you. Until then it sits in 'My Reports' as your personal working copy, and the server genuinely hides it from everyone else, including superadmins. The lifecycle runs in one direction: 1. Draft: edit freely, saving with the Save button as you go. There is no autosave, so an 'Unsaved changes' pill tells you when work is still uncommitted. 2. Completed: mark the report Completed, which starts its edit history. 3. Published: publish it, and it enters the shared Reports Centre under 'Published Reports'. 4. Assigned: only now can you use 'Assign Project' to file it into a project. Publish from the report toolbar or the row menu ('Publish'), then confirm. If the option is disabled you'll see why: 'Mark this report complete before publishing it', or in the builder, 'Save your changes before publishing'. Only the author and superadmins can publish or unpublish. Someone with report management permission can edit, complete and delete a report, but cannot decide whether it is shared. Once published, the report's own access settings decide who reads it: Workspace or Restricted internally, plus clients or collaborators if you shared it with them. One trap worth knowing: unpublishing also removes the report from its project, and the project's Reports tab loses it. Publishing it again does not put it back, so you assign it to the project again yourself.
Portal Worx roles come in two groups: workspace roles, meaning your own team, and external roles, meaning people outside your business you invite onto specific projects. Workspace roles (your own team): - Superadmin: full access to projects, users, reports and workspace settings. Billing is the one carve-out, and it is not granted by the role. You can have as many superadmins as you like, and only the ones flagged as billing managers can open Billing at all (see 'Who can access billing?'). - Admin: manages users, projects, and workspace settings. - User: works on the projects they're assigned to (for example a site manager). External roles (outside your business, invited to specific projects): - Collaborator: an external supplier, engineer, or specialist who works on a project with you, such as a specialist submitting a quality-control report. - Client: your customer, kept in the loop on their own job. Collaborators and Clients are included in unlimited users, like every other user on your plan. They only ever see the specific projects and content you share with them, never your wider workspace, and they can't see each other (see 'Can collaborators and clients see each other?'). On Professional and Business plans you can fine-tune what each role can do (see 'Can I customise what each role can do?').
Yes, on the Professional and Business plans. Open Account, then Settings, then Permissions, and turn individual capabilities on or off per role. The matrix covers things like managing projects, managing reports, viewing users, 'Manage Access Settings' (who may mark a category or folder as Restricted and choose who can open it), sending notifications, using AI features, and more. The Admin and User columns are fully editable. The external columns are deliberately not. For a Collaborator you can toggle four things: reports, templates, sending notifications, and AI features. For a Client you can toggle one: AI features. Everything else for those two roles is fixed, so no toggle exists that could widen what an outside party sees. Superadmins hold every permission in the matrix and can't be restricted. Billing sits outside the matrix entirely and is controlled by billing-manager status instead (see 'Who can access billing?'). Configuring permissions is itself a controlled capability, limited to superadmins. This feature isn't available on the Starter plan.
To invite a user, open User Management in the sidebar and click 'Create New User', or open the user list and click 'New User'. Enter their email, choose a role, and click 'Create'. They receive an email with a link to accept. There is no separate 'Invite User' button: creating the user is what sends the invitation. Invitation links are valid for 7 days. If someone doesn't accept in time, or loses the email, you can resend the invitation, up to 5 resends per invitation with a 30-minute cooldown between them. If the person already has a Portal Worx account under that email, accepting simply links the new organisation to their existing login, so they don't create a second account.
Every user has a status: - Pending: they've been invited or signed up but haven't verified their account yet. - Active: they can log in and use Portal Worx according to their role. - Deactivated: their access is switched off, so they can't log in. Their record and their past contributions are kept. Deactivating is the right choice when someone leaves, since it removes access without erasing their contribution. Plan for one thing before you deactivate someone: it removes them from every project they are assigned to, and reactivating them does not put them back. A deactivate-then-reactivate round trip leaves the user with no project access at all. Note which projects they are on first, then reassign them by hand after reactivating.
Billing access is reserved for superadmins, and not automatically: a superadmin sees the Billing page only if they are flagged as a billing manager. Holding the superadmin role on its own is not enough, so a workspace with several superadmins can still keep billing to one or two people. The account owner, meaning the superadmin who created the organisation, is the billing owner and has final control. The owner is always a billing manager, and can promote other superadmins so they can view and manage the subscription too. A promoted manager can change plans, manage payment methods and cancel, but cannot promote or demote anyone else. If the account needs to change hands, for example when the owner leaves the business, the owner can transfer ownership to another superadmin from Billing, then Billing Managers. Ownership also transfers automatically if the owner is deactivated, role-changed, or deleted. Admins, Users, Collaborators, and Clients never see billing.
To give a customer visibility of their job, invite them as a Client user from User Management. Client users: - Are included in unlimited users, on every plan, at no extra cost. - Only ever see the specific projects you assign them to, and inside those, only the categories and folders shared with them. - Are the least-privileged role in Portal Worx. They hold no management permissions at all, so they can't create or edit projects, manage users, set access on a category or folder, or create reports and templates. Least-privileged does not mean read-only. On a project they are assigned to, a Client can: - Post comments on documents, photos and reports they can see. - Post in a project message thread, if you add them to one. - Upload documents and photos into a category or folder that is shared with them. That is deliberate, because a client answering a query or returning a signed document is usually the point. If you need a container a client cannot add to, don't share that container with them. The only capability you can grant a Client beyond this is AI features (see 'Can I customise what each role can do?'). Clients also never see your collaborators (suppliers, engineers) or any other client, and those parties never see them (see 'Can collaborators and clients see each other?').
A Collaborator is an external person - a supplier, engineer, surveyor, or other specialist - who works on a project with you. Invite them from User Management. Collaborators: - Are included in unlimited users, on every plan, at no extra cost. - Only ever see the specific projects and content you share with them. - Can author their own quality-control or progress reports and build report templates. Both are on by default for this role. - Can comment on, and upload into, any container shared with them on a project they are assigned to. - Never see your wider workspace, your internal team's restricted work, or any other collaborator or client (see 'Can collaborators and clients see each other?'). On Professional and Business plans you can adjust four things for Collaborators: reports, templates, sending notifications, and AI features. The rest of the role is fixed. Collaborators differ from Clients: a Collaborator is a working partner who produces content (reports, uploads), while a Client is your customer kept in the loop on their own job. Both are external and both are free.
No, external people are invisible to each other by default. Portal Worx keeps your external parties separate: - A Client can't see which Collaborators (suppliers, engineers) are working on their job. - One Collaborator can't see another Collaborator on the same project. - Neither can browse a list of the other external people in your workspace. They only ever see: - The internal workspace team members on the projects they share with you. - The specific documents, photos, reports, and message threads you deliberately share with them. This protects commercially sensitive relationships: a client doesn't need to know your supplier list, and competing suppliers don't need to know about each other. If you want two external people to work together, add them both to the same message thread or share a container with both. That shared surface is the deliberate exception.
Click 'Forgot your password?' on the login page and enter your email address. You'll receive a password reset link valid for 1 hour. If you don't see the email, check your spam or junk folder. After resetting, you'll be signed out on every device and will need to log in again with the new password. Completing a reset also clears a login lockout, so if three failed attempts locked you out, resetting gets you back in without waiting. If you signed up with Google you have no password yet, and that is normal. You can carry on using the Google button or a magic link. This same flow is also how you set a password for the first time, if you want one.
First check your spam or junk folder, as most missing emails end up there. If it's still missing, try logging in with your unverified account and you'll be offered the option to send a new verification email (there's a short cooldown between requests). Verification links expire after 24 hours, so don't sit on the email for too long once it arrives. If you signed up with Google there is no verification email to look for. Google has already confirmed your address, so your account is active from the moment you sign up.
The login page is a single stacked form, not a set of tabs. Scroll to the section headed 'Login with Magic Link', enter your email, and click 'Send Magic Link'. We'll email you a one-click login link. The link is valid for 15 minutes and can only be used once. Magic link requests are rate-limited to prevent abuse, so if the email is slow to arrive, wait a moment rather than pressing the button repeatedly. There is nothing to switch on. Magic link works for every account, including one created with Google that has no password, and it works even while a failed-password lockout is running.
If you're invited to another organisation while you already have an account, the invitation links to your existing login, so there's no need to create a separate account. After you log in, you'll see a page headed 'Select Organization' listing every organisation you belong to. Pick one to continue. You have 5 minutes to choose before the selection expires and you need to log in again. Tick 'Remember my choice and make this my default organization' and that one is pre-selected next time. You still see the page, so you can always pick a different one. To move between organisations, log out, log back in, and select the other.
To protect your account, we lock it after 3 consecutive failed password attempts. The lockout lasts 1 hour and clears automatically, with no support request needed. You don't have to wait it out. Completing a password reset clears the lockout, so click 'Forgot your password?' on the login page, follow the emailed link, and set a new password. You can log in immediately afterwards. Magic-link login is tracked separately and also works while a lockout is running. The lockout follows your email address rather than one organisation, so it applies everywhere that address is used.
'Continue with Google' is the first control on the login page, above the email and password fields. Click it, pick your Google account, and you are in. A few things happen behind the scenes: - Your Google email is verified by Google, so no email verification step is needed. - If that email belongs to more than one workspace, you choose which one to enter, exactly as with a magic link. - If you already had an email and password account with a verified workspace, Google is linked to it automatically. You keep one account, not two. - If the email exists but has never been verified anywhere, we refuse to link it and ask you to prove ownership first. That is deliberate: it stops someone claiming your address before you do. The part that catches people out: signing up with Google never creates a password. There is nothing for 'Forgot your password?' to reset, and password login will keep failing no matter how many times you try. So if you signed up with Google, sign in with Google, or use a magic link. If you would also like an email and password login, run 'Forgot your password?' once and set a password for the first time. From then on either method works.
Go to Account, then Settings, then 'Date & Time'. The panel holds three settings: - 'Date Format': MM-DD-YYYY, DD-MM-YYYY, YYYY-MM-DD, or a written form such as '15 Jan, 2025'. - 'Time Format': '24-Hour Clock' or '12-Hour Clock'. - 'Timezone': a list of regions with their UTC offsets, for example '(UTC+0:00) London Time (GMT/BST)'. Click a setting, choose a value, and it saves on the spot. There is no Save button, and the line underneath each one shows what is currently in force. These are personal preferences, not workspace-wide ones. Changing yours affects only your own view. They apply everywhere: activity timelines, comment timestamps, project dates, report history, reminder schedules and audit logs. If dates across the product look a day out or times seem shifted by several hours, this panel is almost always the cause. Emails follow the same rule from the other side. Timestamps in an email are converted to the recipient's own timezone, not the sender's, so a reminder scheduled for 09:00 your time is written in each person's local time when it reaches them. New accounts start on MM-DD-YYYY, a 24-hour clock and UTC, so it is worth setting these on your first day.
Open your account menu, choose Settings, then open the Notifications tab. Each notification type has its own pair of toggles, one for the in-app bell and one for email. They cover document and image uploads, shared documents, images and reports, comment mentions on documents, images and reports, project assignments, being added to a message thread, document reminders, project access requests and decisions, and direct and project messages. A handful always send and have no toggle, because they are account-security or compliance messages: invitations, account activation, password notifications, security alerts, and account-deletion requests. The Notification Centre is a different thing, and it is easy to mix the two up. The bell in the top bar opens the Notification Centre, which is the inbox of notifications you have already been sent. Settings decides what gets sent to you; the Notification Centre shows what arrived. Email is also capped per plan: 500 a month on Starter, 2,000 on Professional, and 5,000 on Business.
Every email Portal Worx sends (invitations, notifications, password resets, report shares) is logged with its delivery status, bounce reason, and recipient. Anyone with the 'Manage Email Delivery' permission can open the Email Delivery Centre and find the message to see exactly what happened. What you can see depends on your role: - Superadmins see every email the workspace has sent, whoever sent it. - Everyone else who holds the permission sees only the emails they sent themselves. If a colleague sent it, ask them or a superadmin to check. The Email Delivery Centre is for your internal staff. Collaborators and clients never have access to it. A status of 'skipped' means the recipient had that notification switched off in their own settings, so nothing was sent. Resending is more limited than it looks. It is available for document-upload, image-upload and document-reminder emails only, and only when the status is sent, delivered or failed. A bounced email cannot be resent at all, deliberately, because repeatedly mailing a dead address damages the sending reputation of every customer. The same email can be resent at most 5 times an hour. So if a mailbox is hard-bouncing, correcting the address with the recipient and sending again from the original screen is the way forward, not a resend.
Direct messages are one-to-one messages between two internal members of your workspace (your own staff). They support up to 10,000 characters per message with read tracking, and they are private: not even admins can read them. Direct messages are workspace-only. Collaborators and clients do not have them. To include an external person in a conversation, use a project message thread instead (see 'How do project message threads work?').
Every project has a Messages tab with conversation threads. Membership is the access grant: you only ever see and post in a thread you have been added to, so a conversation is never exposed to the whole project. - Creating a thread, renaming it, adding or removing members, and deleting it all need the 'Manage Message Threads' permission. Superadmins and admins have it by default, and it can be granted to the User role, for example a site foreman who runs their own threads. - Anyone on the project who holds that permission can manage its threads, not only the person who created them. That means a thread is never stuck when its creator is unassigned from the project. - Anyone on the project can be added to a thread, including collaborators and clients where relevant. They can post like everyone else, but they can never create or manage a thread. - Posting in a thread you belong to needs no permission at all. - Click the member count in a thread's header to see who is in the chat. - You can edit or delete your own messages, react to messages, and @mention other members of the thread. Threads are the right place to bring an external collaborator or client into a conversation. For private one-to-one messages between your internal staff, see 'How do direct messages work?'.
Portal Worx offers three plans. **All three include unlimited users** - your team, your clients and your collaborators (see 'How many users can I have?'). - Starter: up to 10 active projects, 10 GB storage, 500 emails per month, and 50 AI credits per month. Good for getting started. - Professional: unlimited projects, 100 GB storage, 2,000 emails per month, and 500 AI credits per month. Adds advanced reporting, custom branding, and configurable permissions. - Business: unlimited projects, 250 GB storage, 5,000 emails per month, and 3,000 AI credits per month, with all Professional features. Archived and trashed projects do not count toward the active-project figure, so archiving a finished job frees a slot on Starter. See the Pricing page for current prices, and note annual billing saves 20%.
Every new account starts on a 14-day free trial of the Professional plan, with no credit card required upfront, so you can use every feature. As part of our early launch, the first 25 organisations to start a trial become founding members, and that carries two benefits: 1. A 30-day trial instead of 14 days. 2. A 30% discount applied to the subscription for as long as it runs, on whichever plan is chosen. It is not a first-year offer that later steps up. We email you a few days before your trial ends to remind you to choose a plan.
When your trial expires you are shown a notice that cannot be dismissed, and the pages behind it stop loading. This is not a read-only mode: dashboards, projects, documents, reports and messages are all blocked, not only the editing. Three things stay reachable, deliberately: - Billing, in full. You can choose a plan, update the card that failed, read your invoices, check your usage, and change who is allowed to manage billing. Paying is the way out, so nothing about paying is blocked. - Settings, then Account, so you can still request deletion of your own account. That is a legal right and it does not lapse because a subscription did. - Administration, so a superadmin can answer someone's account-deletion request or close the workspace. Your data is untouched throughout. Nothing is deleted and nothing is downgraded while you decide. Choose a plan or fix the payment and full access is restored right away. The same applies if a payment fails on a paid plan, except that the prompt asks you to update your card rather than pick a plan.
Open the Billing page and choose a different plan. Upgrades activate immediately, and you are charged a pro-rated amount for the rest of the current billing period. Downgrades are scheduled for the end of the current period, so you keep every feature you have until then. One limit blocks a downgrade outright, and you have to clear it before it will go through: - Projects. Archive projects until you are at or under the new plan's project limit. Archiving keeps all the data. Your team size is never a blocker, because every plan includes unlimited users. Downgrading never requires deactivating anyone. Storage works differently and is not a blocker either. If you would be over the new plan's storage you are warned, the downgrade still goes ahead, and your existing files stay where they are and stay readable. What changes is that new uploads are refused until you are back under the limit. Before you confirm, you are also shown which features switch off at the changeover, for example advanced reporting or custom branding.
Every Portal Worx plan includes **unlimited users**. There is no seat count, no per-user fee, and no cap to hit - on any plan, including Starter. That covers everyone: - Your own team, meaning Superadmins, Admins and Users. - Your clients, the customers you report to. - The people you bring in from outside, invited as Collaborators. Suppliers, engineers, specialists, or anyone else working the job with you. So you can put your whole crew on it, and add every client and collaborator a job needs, without changing what you pay. Adding someone never costs more, and deactivating someone never saves anything - the price is the price. What your plan does meter is **active projects, storage and AI credits** (see 'What plans are available?'). Those are the figures on the Usage tab of the Billing page, and the ones worth watching. One account is intended for one business. If you are running genuinely separate companies, they need separate workspaces.
Annual billing saves 20% across every plan. See the Pricing page for the exact monthly and annual figures. Switching from monthly to annual takes effect immediately, with the difference pro-rated against your current period. Switching back to monthly takes effect at the end of the annual term.
You can be billed in US Dollars (USD), British Pounds (GBP), Euros (EUR) or South African Rand (ZAR). Your currency is set when your account is created and is locked to your subscription after that, so your bill stays predictable and doesn't move with exchange rates. You can see the exact figures for your currency on the Pricing page and in Billing. If you need the currency on your account changed, contact support.
Storage warnings are emailed at 80% and 90% to the superadmins who are billing managers, since they are the people who can act on it. The 80% mail is advisory and the 90% one is a warning that storage is nearly full. At 100% new file uploads are refused with an error, and you are prompted either to delete files or to upgrade your plan. Everything already uploaded stays untouched and stays readable, so nothing you have is lost by going over. One thing that catches people out: Trash counts toward your storage until items are permanently deleted. That happens automatically 30 days after an item goes into Trash, or sooner if you use 'Permanently Delete'. Emptying Trash is usually the quickest way back under the limit.
Three plans exist: Starter, Professional and Business. Most of the product works on all three. A small set of features is grouped under advanced reporting, which Starter does not include. Advanced reporting gates exactly three actions: - Exporting a report as a PDF. - Sharing a report with people using 'Share'. - Generating a report template with AI. On Starter each of these shows an upgrade prompt reading 'is available on Professional and Business plans' rather than completing. Worth calling out, because the setup path leads here: building your first report ends with a PDF export, and that final step needs Professional or Business. Everything before it, creating the report, adding blocks, completing and publishing it, works on Starter. Two other plan flags follow the same split. Custom branding (your logo, including on report PDFs) and configurable user permissions are both Professional and Business only. Starter uses the default roles. Not gated by plan: emailing documents and photos, which works everywhere. AI features other than template generation are governed by AI credits instead, and every plan gets a monthly allowance, with Starter on 50 (see 'What are AI credits?'). See 'What plans are available?' for storage and project limits.
Your projects, documents, images, reports, users, messages and notifications live in a database schema of their own, one per organisation. A query for one organisation's working data cannot reach another's. A small set of platform-level tables is deliberately shared across organisations, because that data is about the platform rather than about your work: organisation and sign-in records, the security audit log, billing, help centre submissions, and the system administration dashboard. Queries against those tables are scoped to a single organisation explicitly, and that scoping is covered by our automated tests. Alongside the data split: - All traffic is TLS-encrypted end to end. - Authentication cookies are HTTP-only, so JavaScript cannot read them, and carry the Secure flag. - Cross-site request forgery is blocked by token validation. - Authentication, billing and organisation-lifecycle events are written to a security audit log. It is kept for 365 days and then deleted, which meets the usual one-year retention expectations. See the Security page for the full breakdown.
Primary storage (the application database, file storage, and email infrastructure) is hosted in AWS's London region (eu-west-2). Limited data is processed by global sub-processors: Stripe for payments, Cloudflare for bot protection, Google for static map images, and Anthropic for AI features (the Claude models that power project summaries and the help assistant). The full sub-processor list and transfer safeguards are documented in our Privacy Policy and Data Processing Agreement.
No. AI features send only the data needed to produce your result to Anthropic's Claude models, and that data is not used to train those models. A project summary is built only from content you personally have access to. Restricted categories, folders, reports, or message threads you cannot see are never sent to the AI, and your summary history shows only your own summaries. So generating a summary can never expose anything you could not already see yourself.
To request erasure of your own account: 1. Open your account menu, choose Settings, then the Account tab, headed 'Account Management'. 2. Add a reason if you want to. It is optional. 3. Select 'Request Account Deletion', then confirm with 'Submit request'. Your organisation's superadmins are emailed straight away. One of them reviews the request and either approves it or rejects it with a reason. Nothing deletes on a timer and nothing happens without that review. If the request is approved, your account, login credentials and personal information are permanently removed. Projects and documents you created stay in the workspace with your authorship anonymised. Once it has been approved, this cannot be undone. The 30 days you may have heard about is a response deadline, not a grace period before deletion. GDPR Article 12(3) requires an answer within one month, so we chase your superadmins by email on day 21 and again on day 28 to make sure your request is not left sitting. POPIA Section 24 is handled the same way. You can cancel your request yourself for as long as its status is still pending. Once a superadmin has approved it, cancelling is no longer available to you. Two things worth knowing: - If you are the only superadmin in the workspace you cannot request deletion, because it would leave the workspace with nobody able to administer it. Promote another superadmin first. - Closing the whole workspace is a different action, done from Administration by a superadmin. That one does have a real 30-day grace period, and it can be cancelled from the same place at any point before the date. For requests on behalf of someone else (legal guardians, and similar), email privacy@portal-worx.com.
These guides describe a workspace for running projects: documents, site photos, client-ready reports, messaging and an activity trail, with everything the product does set out in one place. Every plan includes unlimited users, so your team, your clients and your collaborators are all covered by one flat price. If you are weighing it up for a client’s data, the security and compliance detail is written out in full.
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