Ledgr/Documentation/Portals & self-service

Portals & self-service

What Ledgr hands to four kinds of people who do not work for you — your customer, your employee, your supplier and your driver. None of them takes a seat on your plan, because none of them is a user of your Ledgr.

The customer portal

Emailing an invoice includes a link. Opening it gives your customer the invoice exactly as you see it — the same single layout used by the preview, the PDF and the emailed attachment — plus:

• A PDF to download.
• A Pay now button, if you have connected PayFast or Yoco under Settings → Payments. Either way the money goes to your merchant account, and the invoice settles itself when the gateway confirms the payment.
• On a quote, Accept or Decline buttons.
• A statement of everything outstanding, if you send them a contact link rather than an invoice link.

Quote acceptance is the one worth switching on

The customer decides, and Ledgr records who typed their name, on which quote, and when. The typed name is the signature.

The page works with no JavaScript at all, because it has to survive whatever browser the customer's email client hands it to. Anybody holding the link can decide — the same trust model as "view and pay online" — but once a quote is decided the link cannot change the decision, so a forwarded email cannot reopen it.

Accepting also moves the deal it came from, so your pipeline reflects the customer's decision rather than somebody's memory of it.

The ordering portal: customers ask for what they want

A customer who reorders every month should not have to phone it in for somebody to retype. Open the ordering portal for them from their contact — Contacts → the customer → Ordering Portal copies their link, opening the portal if it is closed — and they can:

• Browse the products you have chosen to offer, with your sell price and whether each is in stock. Only products you tick Offer this in the customer portal on appear, and the page says in stock or not — never how many you hold.
• Put together a basket and send it. It arrives as a draft quote, priced by Ledgr from your own price list at that moment — a customer cannot name their own price.
• See the quotes they have asked for and the ones you have sent back.

The link lives in the customer's bookmarks rather than an email, so it opens for a year. Close Ordering Portal on the contact ends it, and every portal link already sent to that customer stops working with it.

Employee self-service

Each employee gets their own link, which gives them:

• Every payslip, current and historical, as a PDF.
• Their IRP5 when it is issued.
• Leave balances — annual, sick and family responsibility — and a form to request leave.
• Their deductions and what they are for.
• A way to submit a change of address or banking details for your approval, rather than by WhatsApp message to whoever runs payroll.

This is the tab that stops payroll day being interrupted. It is also the reason payroll never needs to email a payslip as an attachment to a personal address.

The supplier portal

Without a portal, procurement only points one way: you send a purchase order and hear nothing back, and a supplier's invoice arrives as a PDF for somebody to retype. The supplier portal closes that loop. Your supplier can:

• See requests for quotation and submit a priced, multi-line quote.
• See purchase orders awaiting acknowledgement, and confirm them with a delivery date.
• Submit their invoice against a purchase order.
• See which of their invoices are received, queried or paid, and their statement balance with its ageing — including the match verdict, so an invoice held for a price variance is a conversation they can have today rather than a payment that silently does not arrive.
• Offer a price on something nobody asked them to quote for, and revise an offer — a revision arrives as a new version beside the old one rather than overwriting the price you agreed to.
• Keep their own price list, with price breaks, minimum order quantity and order multiples. Adopting a price copies it onto your approved-vendor record, so a contract price cannot move because the other party edited their catalogue.
• Load their compliance documents — B-BBEE certificate or affidavit, tax clearance PIN, VAT, COIDA, insurance, CIPC, bank confirmation — each with its expiry date and what lapses with it, in words.
• Send a despatch advice from the order before delivery, so nothing arrives unannounced. It moves no stock: what you counted is still what you counted, and booking the delivery in marks their despatch as delivered.
• See their own scorecard, including their on-time delivery rating. A rating a supplier cannot see is one they cannot improve.

Whenever a supplier answers an order, sends an invoice, a quote, an offer, a document or a despatch advice, or applies to become a supplier, the people who can change procurement are told — by push, and by email unless it is switched off under Settings → Notifications. The supplier is told so only when somebody was; otherwise they are told it is waiting in your Procurement screen.

The quiet benefit is the matching. A bill somebody retypes from a PDF has no line breakdown to check, so the three-way match falls back to comparing totals — which passes an invoice whose total is right and whose items are wrong. An invoice submitted through the portal carries the purchase-order line on every line as a side effect of how it was submitted, so the strictest payables control in Ledgr becomes the default rather than the diligent case. See procurement.

The driver app

Drivers get a token scoped to one driver record. It opens Ledgr itself in driver mode — not a separate app to install, and not a browser link that expires by lunchtime. Send the pairing link once and the phone stays paired; from then on the driver opens Ledgr and lands straight on their run. There is no email address and no password, because a driver has no Ledgr account to have one.

A driver sees their trip, the stops in order, and captures at each one: who received the goods, their signature, a photograph, the quantities actually handed over, and a reason code if something went wrong — load shedding among them, because it is the most common reason a South African delivery is turned away. They can also mark themselves on the way and arrived, and open and close the trip against an odometer reading.

It is built for a kerbside on a bad connection: one request per screen, reason codes that arrive with their labels so nothing has to be looked up, and every capture safe to send twice. A proof captured with no signal — who received it, the signature, the quantities, the reason — is kept on the phone and sent automatically when there is some. So are its photographs: they are held on the phone with the proof and uploaded after it is accepted, each once, and the app shows them waiting until they have gone. The phone holds a limited amount of photographs for proofs it has not sent; a photograph too large to keep, or one taken when that space is full, is named on the spot so the driver can tell the office what it showed. In a web browser the photographs are held only while the app stays open, and it says so. Nothing is refused for being incomplete — an unsigned proof is recorded and graded as what it is, so a customer who will not sign cannot strand a driver at the door. Logistics & fleet covers what the proof establishes and how it is graded.

Links, expiry and taking access away

Scroll the table sideways to see every column.

Every one of them is scoped to a single record and a single business. A link to one invoice cannot be edited into a link to another, and none of them can reach anything else in your Ledgr. Read security & POPIA for how that is enforced.

Common problems