Level 5: The Customer Portal

Level 5 sends the Customer Portal and shows you exactly what families see on their end: where their order has got to, their documents, how a drawing gets approved, and paying a deposit or balance by card. Takes about 6 minutes.

Step 1: Send the portal and see what the family sees

Open the order and click Customer Portal in the top bar. You get three choices:

• Copy Customer Portal Link: puts a secure link on your clipboard that works for one year, so you can paste it into your own email or a text message. If a family says their link doesn't open, copy a fresh one or use Send Portal Link.

• View Customer Portal: opens the page exactly as the family sees it. Do this once before you send your first one.

• Send Portal Link: sends the link to the contacts on the order, by email to each one with an email address and by text to each one with a mobile number.

On the page itself, written in your company's language whatever language their browser uses, the family sees:

• A header with your shop’s name and a Contact Us button that dials your number, and Honoring [decedent name] underneath, with who served them, a status pill and the order reference.

• Your phone and email and, when you have filled in Website in Settings → Company Profile, a Visit Website link that opens your website in a new tab.

• Choose Your Memorial when the quote has more than one option (Quote A, B, C). The family taps one and presses Confirm Quote A, that option becomes the order, and your team gets a Quote option chosen notification.

• Accept Your Order on every open order, a quote included. The family types the purchaser's name and presses Accept & Sign. The person assigned to the order gets a notification and the Activity Timeline records it, so assign your orders.

• The Progress Timeline, built from your own pipeline stages with the current one highlighted. You control which stages appear: in Settings → Stages, click Edit stages and use the pill on each stage to switch it between Customer-facing and Internal only.

• A Documents list with View and Download on each row, showing every file on the order that is marked External. Generated quotes, contracts and invoices land there automatically. Anything left Internal stays out, and Instructions files and the shop ticket can never be shown. When you generate a document you can also tick Notify the customer in the generate popup to email the family a link to view it.

You can also push a file out to the family the moment you add it. Upload into the order's Files card and a small prompt appears in the bottom-left corner, headed with the file name (or "3 files uploaded") and asking whether the contacts on the order should be notified about it. It appears when at least one contact on the order has an email address and portal notifications switched on.

Click Notify customer and MonuDesk switches those files to External and emails each of those contacts a fresh portal link. The button shows Sent for a moment and the prompt closes. Click No thanks, close the prompt, or leave it alone for eight seconds and nothing is sent: uploads stay Internal, and you can flip one to External later from the control on its row.

Booking an install day works the same way. Schedule an installation for a specific day and a prompt headed Install scheduled for and the date offers to email the family their install date, with Notify customer or No thanks.

Learn more: How the Customer Portal Works

Step 2: Getting a drawing approved

Approving a drawing is what closes out the design step on the order, and it is worth doing deliberately: the approval is the record of what the family signed off on.

• Show the family the drawing: from the portal Documents list once you have switched the drawing to External, or on the quote or contract PDF, which prints the front and back drawings a full page each whatever the file’s own setting is.

• Record the approval on the order: Notes & Files → the drawing’s row menu → Approve Drawing. The row then shows a green check with who approved it and when, and the order’s design task moves to done. On the board, the order's card gets a green check next to the name too.

• A drawing can only be approved once, and the option disappears afterwards. If the family asks for changes, upload or draw a new version and approve that one.

• Families can also ask for changes themselves: in the portal, a drawing waiting for approval has Request changes. Their note appears in a banner at the top of the order, and the Design to-do moves to Changes Requested. Share a new drawing as External and they can approve it or ask for more changes.

• Once a drawing that includes the back side is approved, Delete Back Drawing is refused, because you would be deleting the thing they agreed to.

Learn more: How Families Review and Approve a Drawing

Step 3: Let families pay a deposit or balance by card

With MonuPay connected, families can pay their deposit or remaining balance by card from the portal, with no phone call and no separate invoice. The payment posts back to the order automatically, generates a receipt, and reduces the balance due.

Learn more: How to Log a Payment

Step 4: Service orders get a portal too

A service order (lettering, cleaning, repair, resetting) gets the same customer portal as a monument order, progress timeline and all. Your customer sees the same stage-by-stage timeline built from the stages you marked Customer-facing, the documents you marked External, and your shop’s contact details.

The one real difference is that the link is not sent automatically. On a monument order it goes out by itself, once when the order is saved as a quote and once when it is saved as a confirmed order, as long as Send the portal link automatically is on in Settings → Customer Portal (it starts on); on a service order it does not, and the stage-change notification emails stay off too. Open the order, click Customer Portal, and choose Send Portal Link, or copy the link and send it your own way.

Learn more: How the Customer Portal Works

👉 Continue to: Level 6: Bring In Your Team