Portal Company is the way to allow Customers and Suppliers to View, Update and Create information into ShipX system to help collaborate. With Portal Company, users can also generate automated Reports and Trigger Integrations for Bookings & Vouchers related to them. This is a powerful tool.
Setup
To setup a portal company, you'll need to do 3 steps:
- Setup the PORTAL_ADMIN and PORTAL_USER roles (do this only once).
- Create Portal Company.
- Setup Portal Reports.
Setup Roles
Roles are very fine grain control for the entire system, even more for the Portal Company as it allows some companies such as Suppliers to Update the system, and Customers to simply view the booking, or Create bookings. In general the default role be sufficient. You may export a role and duplicate the permission to have different roles for different portal companies such as some to export reports. You only need to setup the roles once.
It is critically important to have PORTAL_ADMIN and PORTAL_USER roles before you start. For a lot of cases, they would want an admin to only add and remove users, but NOT perform any operational task.
In general, if no permission is given to the user with specified role, they will be confronted with a "No Access" sign:
Create Portal Company
Go to Manage > Portal Company. With the correct permissions, PortalCompany you should be able to create a portal Company. When creating, there lies two distinct differences between the listed companies. It is important to understand the two below.
Viewable Company:
Any user tied to these Viewable Portal Company would be allowed to view any Bookings and Vouchers related to this company. If the booking has any Shipper/Consignee/Billable/Transporter tied to the booking, they are able to view view and search the booking accordingly. If the voucher (invoice or payment) is to or from any Viewable Company, they will be allowed to view and search the voucher.
Bookable Company:
Any user for the portal company.... to these Bookable Companies Portal Company would be allowed to make bookings on behalf of these companies.
Booking
Voucher
Vouchers can only be viewed if the bill to or bill from matches the Viewable Company for the user's portal company. Only Approved vouchers will be displayed as seen below.
The figure above, (left) operations user which can see a submitted voucher and an approved voucher that does NOT belong to the portal company user on the right. (right) does not see any approved vouchers.
The figure above shows the same as the previous figure, but the submitted voucher is now approved and can now be seen by the user.
When searching the voucher, as the same, only companies matching the Viewable Companies and Approved vouchers can be viewed. The main difference for a portal user is if you click on the Voucher Number, or the eye icon, it opens to a new window that has a printable voucher instead of an operational user's voucher modal.
Report
Reports can be assigned to the portal company. Someone must create a report in the reports section first. Then select the portal company they want daily reports to be sent. They should set the name, select report and select the hours they want to send this report. The report will query all jobs with the shipperRequiredDateStart is at the start of the Day, to the end of the day. Currently selecting report to span previous days is not supported.
