How to Give Clients Real-Time Project Visibility Without a Salesforce License

Your clients want to know what is happening with their project. Today, that means weekly status emails somebody has to write, or a shared spreadsheet nobody keeps updated. What if clients could see real-time progress, submit requests, and review documents — all without needing Salesforce access?

The Status Update Problem

Every consulting firm and ISV hits this wall: your team tracks work inside Salesforce, but your clients do not have Salesforce licenses. So you bridge the gap with emails, PDFs, and screen shares. Every status update takes 15–30 minutes to compile. Multiply that by the number of clients and the number of weeks, and you are losing days per month to reporting.

Client Portal licenses from Salesforce exist, but they start at $5/user/month for limited access. For five clients with three stakeholders each, that is $75/month just so people can see their own data.

Delivery Hub's Client Portal

Delivery Hub includes a free client portal with 36+ pages that runs on your own domain. External users authenticate with a magic link or passkey — no Salesforce license required. They see only their own entity's data, scoped by the Network Entity record in your org.

What Clients Can Do

• Dashboard — at-a-glance stats, phase distribution, recent activity, and attention items
• Work item list — filterable board of all items in their scope, with status, priority, and assignee
• Timeline view — Gantt-style visualization of their project schedule
• Submit requests — self-service form that creates a Work Item in your Salesforce org
• Comment and collaborate — inline comments on work items, with file attachments
• Review documents — invoices, status reports, and proposals with approve/dispute workflow
• Log time — external team members can log their own hours
• Analytics — burndown, cycle time, workload distribution, and dependency graphs

How It Works (Architecture)

The portal is a Next.js application hosted on Vercel (or anywhere you want). It communicates with your Salesforce org through a REST API secured by API key authentication. The API key is tied to a Network Entity record, which scopes all queries to that client's data.

This means:

• No Salesforce licenses consumed
• No Guest User security concerns
• Data stays in your Salesforce org — the portal reads and writes through the API
• You control exactly what is visible per entity

Setting It Up

1. Create a Network Entity for each client in Delivery Hub. This is the record that represents their organization and scopes their data.
2. Generate an API key on the Network Entity. This key authenticates the portal's requests.
3. Create Portal Access records for each external user (email + role). Roles include Viewer, Contributor, and Admin.
4. Deploy the portal or point your DNS to the hosted version at cloudnimbusllc.com/portal. Users receive a magic link to log in.

Real-World Example

One of our clients uses Delivery Hub to manage work across three Salesforce orgs. Their end customers — large financial institutions — need to see project progress, approve invoices, and submit change requests. Before the portal, this required a weekly 45-minute status call per client plus a manually compiled PDF report.

After deploying the client portal, those status calls dropped to biweekly 15-minute check-ins. The clients self-serve their own answers. Invoice disputes that used to take email chains now happen inline with one-click approve or dispute.

What It Costs

Nothing. The portal is part of the Delivery Hub managed package. You host it yourself (Vercel's free tier works fine for most teams) or use the hosted version. No per-user fees, no portal license add-ons, no premium tier required.