Create a client and send a portal link

Goal#

Add a person you coach as a client (a CoachingClient profile owned by your practice and assigned to one Coach), then give them access to their portal, where they complete the exercises you assign, draw with you on whiteboards, and see, book, cancel and move their sessions with you. The portal needs no password and no account: the client opens a magic link.

Prerequisites#

• An onboarded Coach account. No package limits how many clients a practice keeps.

1. Create the client#

In the app: Clients, Add client. You can add several people in one go (up to 100 rows); the app reports what happened to each row.

Field	Rule
Name	required, up to 120 characters
Email	optional; needed to mail the portal link; unique among the practice's clients
Phone, pronouns	optional, up to 40 characters
Timezone	optional IANA timezone, such as Europe/London
Context	optional, up to 200 characters: why they came to you
Organisation, job role	optional, up to 120 characters each; the client can keep them up to date in the portal
Default billing	Paid (the default) or ProBono: what each new session with the client starts as (see Plan and log sessions)
Started	optional date, today or earlier

New clients are assigned to you. An Admin can assign them to another Coach instead.

Each row gets one of these results:

Result	Meaning
created	the profile exists now
already exists	the practice has a client with this email; that client is left as it is
duplicate	the same email appears twice in your rows
invalid email	the email is not a valid address

No package limits how many clients a practice keeps. Creating a client sends them nothing.

Sessions a client has left#

How many sessions a client has is not a profile field. It comes from their purchases: an Offer they bought on a booking page, or sessions you grant them, from one of your Offers or agreed by hand ("5 sessions", of any length). Each purchase lists its sessions with four numbers: total, used (held), planned (planned or requested) and left. A purchase is complete once every session in it is held; one you cancel stops counting. A client without a purchase has no agreed number of sessions. Clients who had a number of sessions included before now have a purchase called "Sessions agreed" with that number.

On the client card, under Purchases (you must be the client's assigned Coach or an Admin):

• Grant sessions: pick one of your active Offers (its sessions are copied and given free, under its name unless you type another), or type a name and up to 10 kinds of session of your own, each with a kind, a length (or any length) and a count.
• Adjust: rename a purchase or change a count. A count never goes below the sessions already held or planned; raising one reopens a complete purchase. A cancelled purchase cannot be adjusted.
• Cancel: an active purchase stops counting and nothing more is drawn from it; its sessions stay as they are. A complete purchase cannot be cancelled.

Each booking of an Offer is a purchase of its own (see Publish booking pages and embed them). Every grant, adjustment and cancellation is on the client's timeline.

2. Send a portal link#

In the app: open the client, Portal, Send portal link. You choose whether the app mails the link to the client's email address or only shows it to you so you can hand it over yourself.

• A link works once, for seven days. A new link retires the previous unused one.
• Opening it signs the client in to the portal for 30 days on that browser.
• A client can also ask for a fresh link themselves at https://coaching-toolkit.com/portal with their email address.
• Assigning an exercise mails the client a link on its own (see Assign an exercise).
• With the Intake questionnaire settings turned on (on your public profile for a client you create, on a booking page for a first booking there), a client you create (or who books with you for the first time) is assigned the Intake straight away, so the same mail goes out without a step from you (see Assign the Intake automatically).

To sign a client out everywhere and void their open links, press Revoke access in the client's Portal section.

What the client sees#

• On the first visit, before anything else, a short privacy notice: what you see (their answers, sessions and payments), who runs the service, and a link to the privacy policy. Continue accepts it. Until then the portal shows nothing of the exercises, action items, sessions or booking. When the notice changes, it is shown once more. The client card's exported record says when it was accepted.
• Five tabs, Exercises, Actions, Sessions, Whiteboards and Profile, under your practice's name or logo, "with" your name, and the line "Your coach sees the answers you give here".
• At the top of Exercises, their next session (or Book a session when nothing is coming up and your default booking page takes bookings).
• Their exercises, split into To do and Completed, with progress ("3 of 24 steps") and any due date.
• Each exercise as a list of steps they can open, answer and come back to; a completed exercise can be reopened and edited, and you see that it changed.
• Under Actions, the action items you added to your sessions (see Goals and notes): open ones first with their due day and the session they came from, then done ones. The client ticks one off, or unticks it, and you see who did it on the client card.
• Their result, for Values Discovery the values wheel first.
• Under Whiteboards, the boards you shared and the boards they created themselves, to draw on with you or alone (see Whiteboards).
• Their sessions with you (below).
• Under Profile, their organisation and job role, which they can change; the change shows on the client card and in its timeline. Nothing else of the profile is theirs to edit.

The portal never shows goals or notes (only the action items of your sessions), and never another client's anything.

Sessions in the portal#

Under Sessions the client sees their upcoming sessions (requests waiting for you and booked sessions, soonest first) and their earlier ones, in their own timezone: the profile's timezone, else their browser's.

• A booked session shows the meeting link (Join the session), "add to calendar" links and its payment, with Pay now while a Checkout is still open.
• Book a session appears when the client's assigned Coach's default booking page takes bookings (see Publish booking pages and embed them). The client picks one of that page's Offers, a slot and, optionally, a note for you; there is no contact form. The booking follows the page's rules exactly: the same open slots, Booking approval (a request you approve or decline), Checkout for a priced Offer (only a card hold under approval), and the same mails to the client and to you. It never creates a second client profile.
• The client also sees their purchases with the four numbers per kind of session (a cancelled one is not shown). While a purchase has sessions left, Book a session offers the next one from it: the slot picker uses that session's length (60 minutes for sessions of any length), the session counts toward that purchase, and nothing is asked to pay again.
• When the sessions of the client's purchases are used up (held or planned), the client can still book an Offer; the booking screen says nothing is left, and you decide about it.
• Cancel a booked session, or Withdraw request for one still waiting for you, until 24 hours before its start; after that the portal asks the client to contact you. An open payment request is withdrawn and a card hold released; you get a mail.
• Change time moves a booked session to another open slot at once; with Booking approval it is Propose a new time instead, with the same limits as the manage link (one proposal waiting, three in all).

On the client card's timeline, a booking made in the portal reads "Booked a session from the portal".

Change status or assignment#

• Status: use the status actions on the client card. Ended deletes nothing. Allowed: Active to Paused or Ended, Paused to Active or Ended, Ended to Active.
• Profile: edit any of the fields above on the client card; clearing a field removes its value.
• Assignment (Admins only): reassign the client from the client card to another Coach. Private notes stay with the Coach who wrote them.

Export a client's record#

When a client asks for a copy of what you hold about them, or before you erase it: open the client, Export record, then JSON (a download) or Printable (a page to print or save as PDF). The assigned Coach and Admins can export. Both formats hold the same record. The record holds the profile, the status history, every exercise with each step's answer and the result, goals, sessions, reschedule requests, payments (amounts, statuses and dates; no Stripe ids), portal access and the timeline. Notes are yours only: your client note and your session notes; another Coach's notes are never in it, an Admin's export included. Each export is recorded in the audit log as client.exported (who and which format, not the content), and you can export a client five times an hour.

Erase a client#

When a client asks for their record to be erased, an Admin can do it: open the client, Delete permanently (next to the status actions), read what is deleted and what stays, and type the client's name to confirm.

• Deleted for good: the profile, exercises with every answer and result, goals, every Coach's client notes and session notes with their action items, sessions and reschedule requests, payment records, portal links and sessions (the client is signed out), group memberships. Sessions pushed to a connected calendar are removed from it.
• Kept: the practice's audit log, with the client named "a deleted client", and one client.erased entry naming the Admin. Payments stay in your own Stripe account; nothing is changed there.
• If the same person books again later, they get a new, empty profile.
• Ending a client deletes nothing; erasure cannot be undone. Export the record first if the client wants a copy.

Erasure is refused when:

• the name you typed is not the client's name;
• the client has an open payment request or a held card: cancel the request, or wait for the hold to be captured or released;
• you are not an Admin of the practice.

Verify it worked#

Open Clients and search for the client by name or email. Their card shows the status Active; on the Profile tab, the Portal section shows when the last link was sent, and once the client has opened it, 1 or more portal sessions.

When the client books, cancels or moves a session in the portal, these are the reasons it can be refused:

• the Coach's default booking page takes no bookings (off, past the package's limit, or without a bookable Offer), or the client is not live;
• the Offer is not on the page;
• someone took the slot, or the Coach's calendar became busy;
• it is less than 24 hours before the start, so the session can no longer be cancelled;
• the session can no longer be cancelled or moved (held, cancelled, started, or a request when moving);
• a proposed new time is already waiting for the Coach;
• the session has had its three proposals.

Failure cases#

• Editing a client to an email another client of the practice has is refused.
• Ended cannot go straight to Paused.
• A mailed portal link needs an email address; add one, or show the link and hand it over yourself.
• An Ended client can still be sent a portal link and reads their portal, but cannot book, sign, tick off or start anything new there; they can still change an exercise they finished.
• A client can only be reassigned to a Coach of the practice.
• More than five exports of one client in an hour are refused.
• Only the client's Coach or an Admin can change a client; a Member cannot assign to another Coach.
• A client of another practice is not found.