A client portal is where a firm and its clients trade documents and finished work over months or years. A deal room is where a seller shows a buyer a business in stages before the sale closes. Both depend on who can open which folder, and on whether a label on the screen says so.
Where the reading starts
A firm whose client files and questions still live in email has its first guide in how to set up a client portal for a small firm. It starts from the five jobs a portal does and ends with a first-year cost count in hours as well as fees.
Who sees what in a client portal comes next. It sets four levels of access and gives every guest an end date. The client portal access plan is the worksheet that records those choices for each client before the first invitation.
A seller, or a broker working for one, reads a deal room for a small business sale. It covers the index, the file names, access in stages and the log of what each buyer could see.
What sits outside these guides
The guides stop at the portal and the room themselves. How a sale runs, what a buyer checks and what the purchase agreement says belong to the seller's broker, attorney and accountant. Server and account security in depth belongs to a security adviser.
Three cases the guides retell
Each guide carries one Federal Trade Commission case. In the setup guide, a mortgage analytics company's vendor kept scanned loan files on a cloud server with no password, and the commission settled with the company in December 2020. In who sees what, a former contractor at Chegg, an education technology company, used a login that staff and contractors shared to take a database of about 40 million users in 2018. The deal room guide follows Blackbaud, a software company that kept data long past its use and lost Social Security and bank account numbers to a hacker in early 2020.
Reading path
- How to set up a client portal for a small firm
What a client portal does for a small firm, and how a first-year count of fees and hours settles whether to buy or build one.
- Who sees what in a client portal
How a small firm sets each person's access before the first invitation goes out, so each client opens only their own files.
- A deal room for a small business sale
How a seller or broker organizes documents for buyers and opens them in stages, one buyer at a time, with a record of who saw what.
Worksheets for this guide
- The client portal access plan
A printable worksheet that records who can see and do what in a client portal, filled in before anyone gets an invitation.