Stop emailing documents and hoping they arrived.
A client portal gives your customers a secure logged-in area to view documents, statements and requests and to make payments. Haryes builds these to integrate with the systems you already run and to authenticate safely.
The portal replaces work your staff are doing by hand.
A client calls for a statement. Someone finds it, exports it, emails it. A document comes back as a photograph of a printout. A payment arrives with no reference. Every one of those is staff time, and it scales linearly with clients.
What that costs, in practice:
- Sensitive documents sent over email and WhatsApp, where you lose control of them immediately.
- No record of who received what and when, which matters the moment anything is disputed.
- Staff hours spent answering questions a client could answer themselves at midnight.
- Payments arriving with no reference, so reconciliation becomes detective work.
How a portal is built
Scoped to a first version that earns, then extended.
Discovery
What clients ask for most, who inside your business answers it, and what systems already hold the data.
A scope based on real work.
Design the access model
Who can see what, how accounts are created, and what happens when someone leaves a client organisation.
Security decided up front.
Build the core
Authentication, documents, statements and requests, integrated with the systems you already run.
A first version that is useful.
Add payments
M-Pesa and card where you need it, with the reference attached automatically so reconciliation is not manual.
Payments that match themselves.
Roll out
A pilot group of clients first, then the rest, with support material and your team trained.
Adoption, not just a launch.
What makes a portal get used
Most portals fail on adoption rather than on engineering.
It has to be faster than calling
If finding a statement takes four clicks, people will phone instead, and your staff cost does not fall.
Speed is the feature.
It must work on a phone
Most clients will open it on a mid-tier Android over mobile data, not on a desktop.
Mobile is the default.
It needs live data
A portal showing last month's figures teaches clients not to trust it, and they stop coming back.
Integrate, do not export.
Login must be survivable
Password resets, new staff at the client, and lost access all need to work without an email to you.
Self-service or nothing.
What you get
Custom software, scoped individually. Discovery is KES 180,000 and is credited against the build.
Secure authentication
Built properly, not improvised.
- Role-based access
- Self-service password recovery
- Sessions and permissions handled correctly
Documents and statements
With an audit trail.
- Upload, download and versioning
- Who accessed what, and when
- Live data from your systems
Payments
Reconciled automatically.
- M-Pesa, and cards where needed
- References attached to every payment
- Receipts issued to the client
Admin and support
For your team.
- Client and user management
- Activity visible to staff
- Training and documentation
Questions clients ask before they commit
What does a client portal cost?
Portals are custom software, starting from KES 150,000 depending on the integrations and the feature set. Discovery at KES 180,000 produces a fixed scope and is credited against the build.
Can it connect to our accounting system?
Usually. If the system has an API, we integrate directly. If it does not, there are workable alternatives, and we establish which applies during discovery rather than assuming.
How do we get clients to use it?
By making it faster than the alternative and by rolling out to a small group first. Portals fail on adoption far more often than on engineering.
Is our data safe?
That depends on decisions made during the build: access model, encryption, hosting and audit logging. We specify each of those explicitly rather than leaving them to default settings.
What is driving this?
Your team spends hours on requests clients could self-serve.
Start with the three things they ask for most.
Scope my portalLarger clients expect a portal before they sign.
A focused first version can ship quickly and grow after.
See custom applicationsA portal is worth building when staff time spent answering routine questions has become a real number.
