Features
Your client approves it on their phone. Your budget updates itself.
The client opens a portal link with no account, taps Approve, and you see it on the item with the date.
One link, one tap, no more maybes · 0:51
One link, no account. Clients see the selections and the budget the way you choose to show them, and every approval lands on the item with the date.
So they stop texting you for updates.
Clients don't text because they're difficult. They text because they can't see anything.
Think about what your client's experience of the project looks like from their side: a proposal PDF from three weeks ago, a thread of emails with images attached, a payment receipt, and silence while you chase a sofa through a supplier's warehouse.
They're spending more on this project than on almost anything else in their life. Of course they text.
The industry's standard advice is to manage this with boundaries — reply-next-business-day policies, no-texting rules. Policies treat the symptom. The cause is that your client has no window into the project between meetings.
The Mortar portal is that window. It's live, it carries your branding, and it shows each client exactly what you want them to see of their own project: current selections, what needs their decision, where the budget stands, what's ordered and on its way. When the answer to "any update on the dining chairs?" is already on their screen, the 9pm text doesn't get sent.
A separate client login, restricted to what you choose
The reason most designers don't share their project tool with clients is that the tool shows everything: trade pricing, margin, supplier names, the internal notes. So the client gets PDFs instead, and the window stays shut.
Mortar's portal is a genuinely separate client login — not your workspace with a guest password. What each client sees is a per-link setting, decided by you:
- Prices: full item pricing, totals only, or no pricing at all. Your trade costs and margin are never in the portal, whatever you choose — the client view is built only from what clients are allowed to see, so there's no column to accidentally unhide.
- Suppliers: supplier and vendor names can be hidden per client link — and new client shares hide them by default. Your client approves "the linen sofa", not your trade account at the supplier.
Your team logs into the full workspace — trade info, real costs, supplier terms for owners and admins, with member roles that never see cost or margin. Your client logs into their project. Same data, two rooms, and the door between them is yours to configure.
Approvals that don't live in email threads
The most expensive sentence in this business is "I never approved that."
In Mortar, every selection goes to your client as a proper approval — image, spec, price, one clear decision to make. They approve or decline in the portal, and the answer is recorded against the item, on a date, in one place. No mining a four-month email thread to prove what was signed off. No approvals lost between an email, a text, and a comment your client made at site.
For your client it feels less like paperwork and more like the fun part of the project: here's what your designer proposes, here's what it costs, say yes.
And decisions come back faster — because approving from the sofa on a Tuesday night beats waiting for the next meeting.
Plans and design packs, approved where the project lives
Selections aren't the only thing clients need to sign off. Floor plans, joinery drawings, design packs — the documents that today go out as email attachments and come back as "see my comments in red, page 4, also see Dave's email".
Upload them to the project and share them to the portal: your client views the pack, adds their notes against it, and approves it in the same place they approve everything else. The feedback thread lives on the document instead of across three inboxes, and the approval is on the record next to the plan it belongs to.
The budget, live — not the budget, eventually
Budget conversations go bad in the gap between what the client remembers and what the spreadsheet says. Mortar closes the gap by making the budget something your client can see, continuously.
Budgets in Mortar are visual — progress bars and colour-coded status, with costs that update in real time as selections change and orders land. You choose what the client sees, and what they see is current. When the budget picture is shared and live, the money conversation happens early and calmly, not at the end and loudly.
No surprises at install. No forensic meeting about where the contingency went. The numbers were never a mystery, so they never become a confrontation.
On their phone, wherever they are
Your clients live on their phones, and their project should too. The portal works beautifully on mobile — approvals from the school pickup line, budget check from the airport, showing the powder-room tile to a friend at dinner.
That last one matters more than it sounds. Which brings us to the part nobody puts on a feature list.
Nothing to install. Nothing to learn.
Your clients did not hire you to onboard them into project management software, and the fastest way to kill a portal is to make it feel like homework.
Mortar's portal opens in the browser. No app to download, no training, no manual. It's built to be understood in the first ten seconds by someone who will never use design software again after this project — because it looks like what it is: their project, presented the way you'd present it.
It carries your studio's branding, and you choose how the work reads — including a Pinterest-style board view for when the moment calls for a presentation rather than a list. Your client doesn't experience "a tool." They experience your studio, being exceptional between meetings as well as during them.
The portal your clients show their friends
Design studios grow on referrals. And a referral usually starts with a client showing someone the project.
Today that's a camera-roll scroll and "she's amazing, I'll forward you her email." With Mortar, it's your branded portal on their phone — the boards, the rooms coming together, the whole production run with visible care. Your client gets to look like someone with impeccable taste and a design team that has it handled. You get to be the studio behind that.
A beautiful client experience isn't a soft benefit. In a referral business, it's the growth engine. The portal makes the invisible part of your work — the rigor, the tracking, the calm — visible to exactly the people your next client asks for a recommendation.
What this looks like in your week
- Selection approvals come back in days, recorded, instead of drifting across email threads.
- "Any update?" messages fall away, because the update is always on their screen.
- Budget conversations happen early, against numbers you both trust.
- Plans come back approved, with the notes on the document instead of across inboxes.
- Handover meetings spend their time on design, not status.
- And when the project wraps, your client has spent months inside a branded experience worth talking about.
The portal is one part of Mortar — behind it sit the visual budgets, product sourcing, and procurement tracking that keep it accurate without extra work from you. But the portal is the part your clients will remember.
See it the way your client would
The portal is better seen than described — that's rather the point.
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