A tour of the Customer Portal

Open Account in the sidebar. It opens on the Linked Portals tab, and the first thing on it is Your Linking code, a short code in the form 1M1Q-S86N-XUV4. Copy it with the icon beside it.

This code identifies your company to any contractor who wants to share work with you. It is not a password, but it is not for publishing either: treat it like a bank sort code.

Send the code to whoever administers Sync at your contractor. They enter it at their end, and the link is established from their side, not yours.

That direction matters. You cannot link yourself to a contractor, and nobody can link themselves to you without the code. If you employ four contractors, the same code goes to all four.

Back on Linked Portals, every established link appears in the table below the code, with its status, who it was linked from, the link type and the date.

This is the list to check first whenever the portal looks emptier than you expected. A contractor who is not listed here has not completed the link, whatever they may have told you.

The portal opens on Dashboard, which has four tabs. The first is health and safety, and everything on it is filtered by the Date Range control at the top, which starts on year to date.

The density chart is the one worth learning to read. Raw near miss counts punish the busiest job; near misses per 1,000 hours worked tells you something closer to the truth, which is why the portal needs the hours as well as the reports.

The second tab is about delivery and supply chain compliance rather than incidents.

Any projects you have bookmarked appear here too, which is covered in step 14.

The last two dashboard tabs narrow to people and suppliers.

Engineer dashboard shows how many engineers are on site live, the split of their credentials between valid, expiring soon and expired, and an on-site risk overview grouping them into compliant, watchlist and at risk.

Subcontractor dashboard shows the same compliance split across the subcontractors working on your jobs, and ranks the top five driving the most risk, measured by how many of your projects a non-compliant supplier is on.

Projects is the job-by-job view, and the column that makes it useful is Contractor. Every contractor who has linked to you appears in the same list, so you are comparing jobs rather than logging into one portal per supplier.

Filter by project reference or project name, and sort on any column. View map plots the same projects geographically, though a job only appears there once it carries location data.

Click a project name and it opens on Summary, with seven tabs across the top.

The project team table is more useful than it looks. It gives you a name, a role and an email for the people actually running the job, so a query goes to the right person rather than to whoever you happen to have a number for.

Log entries is the attendance record: every day somebody signed in on the job, and who they were. It is deliberately spare, two columns, and it covers both the contractor's own people and the engineers of any subcontractor working under them.

Click any name, in Log entries or in the Engineers tab, and their record opens: contact details, then every credential they hold with its status and expiry date, and any documents attached to it.

This is the single most valuable thing in the portal. You can establish, for yourself and without asking anyone, whether the person who was on your site on a given day held the cards they were supposed to hold. That question used to take an email and a wait.

Project Documents lists what the contractor holds against the job, filterable by document name, category, subcategory and visibility. Drawings is separate, and shows each drawing's status, who uploaded it, when, and any comment left with it.

Visibility is the control that decides what reaches you. If a document you expect is not there, it has not been shared rather than deleted, and the contractor can change that.

Tasks and comments is the running record on the job, with a colour legend at the top: yellow for not started, blue for in progress, green for complete, red for past its due date and incomplete, and grey for a plain comment.

Filter by commenter or date added. Each row carries its content, anyone mentioned in it, and a due date where it is a task rather than a comment.

If you are visiting the job yourself, the Site induction tab carries the contractor's induction for that site, with a Start site induction button. Doing it in advance, from your desk, beats doing it at the gate.

The same tab lists the completion records: who has taken it, from which company, which version they took, their score, when they completed it and whether they scanned the QR code on arrival.

The bookmark icon sits beside the project name, both in the list and on the record itself. Click it and that job pins to Bookmarked Projects on the projects dashboard, with its name and reference.

With ten jobs it is a convenience. With sixty across five contractors it is the difference between a dashboard you use and one you stop opening.

There are two different ways to give someone access, and picking the wrong one is the most common mistake on this screen.

The role chosen on the invitation is only their starting role. Once they accept, manage their permissions in Account, then Users, like anyone else.

Audits is the one part of the portal where you are creating rather than reading, and it is a programme of your own: your templates, your sites, your auditors, scored and tracked separately from anything your contractors run.

The hub opens on Overview, with counts for audits scheduled, due today, completed this month and open actions, then tabs for Templates, Scheduled, Completed and Corrective actions.