Level 5: The Customer Portal

Send the Customer Portal and see what families see — progress timeline, documents, drawing approval and paying by card, on service orders as well as monuments. About 6 minutes.

Written By Dennis Rodin

Last updated 7 days ago

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 short link on your clipboard (portal.monudesk.com plus a short code, not the long token it used to be) so you can paste it into your own email or a text message.

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

  • Send Portal Email — emails the link to the customer on the order.

On the page itself 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.

  • The Progress Timeline, built from your own pipeline stages with the current one highlighted. You control which stages appear: in Settings → Order Management, open the stage editor 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 — 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.

The one thing that switches the portal off: no customer email on the order. The Customer Portal button is greyed out with "Add a customer email to enable the portal" until you add one. Nothing else disables it.

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.

  • 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.

  • Once a drawing that includes the back side is approved, Delete Back Drawing is refused — 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.

A few things to know:

  • You connect your merchant account through PayFactory in Settings → Integrations. The only gate is PayFactory approving your application — allow a few days for it.

  • The portal’s pay button only appears once your application is approved and the order has a balance due.

  • Card (credit and debit) and Apple Pay are the portal’s payment options. ACH bank transfer is not one of them — ACH exists only as a method you pick when you record a payment yourself on the order.

  • The rate is 2.99% on cards and debit cards and 3.99% on American Express, which the processor fixes.

  • Depending on the fee model you chose when connecting, that fee is either added to the customer’s total or absorbed by your shop. Either way the order balance only goes down by the base amount.

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 emailed automatically. On a monument order it goes out by itself when the order is created; 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 Email — or copy the link and send it your own way.

Ignore the wizard tooltip. The new-order wizard still says the Customer Portal is not available for service orders. That is out of date and refers only to the automatic-send switch on that screen. The portal itself works on service orders, and your lettering customer can follow their job stage by stage.

Learn more: How the Customer Portal Works

✅ Level 5 complete. Families can now follow their order, see their documents, and pay by card without calling you.

👉 Continue to: Level 6: Bring In Your Team