Client portal development, linked to your ERP

When a B2B customer portal pays off

A quick note on scope first. If you run an accountancy practice or an agency and want a ready-made client portal for sharing files and messages, an off-the-shelf product will usually be cheaper and quicker. This page is about portals built around your own systems and processes, typically for distributors, manufacturers, wholesalers and service companies with trade accounts.

A bespoke portal earns its keep when the same requests reach your team every week and the answer already sits in your ERP. The most common signs:

• Account managers spend hours sending statements, copy invoices and proofs of delivery.
• Customers ask by email for certificates, safety data sheets or spec sheets that you already hold.
• Repeat orders arrive as emails or PDFs that someone retypes into the ERP.
• Buyers and accounts payable staff at the same customer need different information, and both ring you.
• Customers want to know their balance or credit position before placing an order.
• Returns, faults or service requests arrive by phone and are tracked in someone's inbox.

What a client portal connected to your ERP includes

The core of a B2B customer portal is the connection to your ERP, which is what lets each customer see their own data without anyone preparing it. The rest is built around what your customers ask for today:

• Account statement and open balance, read from Xero, Sage, Business Central or your ERP.
• Order and dispatch status, with proof of delivery once it exists.
• Invoices and credit notes as PDFs, searchable by date, order number or PO.
• Documents per account: contracts, price lists, certificates or service reports.
• Several users per customer company, each with a role: a buyer sees orders, accounts payable sees invoices.
• Requests with a status: returns, faults or service calls that your team picks up and closes inside the portal.

Read live from the ERP or keep a synchronised copy

This is the technical decision that most affects speed and cost. Reading live means every screen calls the ERP, which is simple but bounded by its API limits: Xero, for instance, allows 5,000 calls a day per organisation. Keeping a synchronised copy in the portal's own database makes pages fast and keeps load off the ERP, at the price of a sync process that has to be built and monitored.

Most portals end up mixed: invoices and orders synchronised, balances read live when a customer asks. The detail of that connection is the same work as our ERP integration services, and it is checked against your real ERP in discovery rather than assumed.

Bespoke portal or the one your systems already include

Some ERPs, accounting packages and ecommerce platforms include a customer area or online invoice links. If that covers what your customers ask for, use it: it costs less and is already connected. If ordering is the main need, what you want may be a B2B ordering portal rather than a service portal.

A bespoke portal makes sense when the data comes from more than one system, when your customers' companies have several users with different permissions, or when the requests and workflows are specific to how you work.

UK GDPR basics for a customer portal

B2B does not mean no personal data: the names, emails and phone numbers of your customers' staff are personal data under UK GDPR. The ICO's guidance requires appropriate technical and organisational measures for the risk, including proper access controls, recommends encryption when storing or transmitting personal data, and expects you to test regularly that the measures work. If a supplier hosts or processes that data for you, a written contract between controller and processor is required; the ICO notes this guidance is under review following the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. In practice, a portal should cover at least the following. Check the specifics with your adviser:

• Each customer company's data isolated, and that isolation tested, not assumed.
• Strong passwords, with multi-factor authentication for your staff and admin accounts.
• A log of who accessed what, and a quick way to remove a contact who leaves.
• Only the data each role needs: accounts payable does not need delivery addresses.

How we would build your portal

A distributor could start with invoices, statements and proof of delivery, which tend to generate the most calls, and add orders and requests later. You see a working demo every two weeks with your own ERP data in a test environment, under one fixed price per project. Contracting entity, invoicing and data-processing terms are set out in writing in the proposal, and the method is explained on our page about fixed price software development.