Glossary
Portal terms, defined
Plain answers to the questions people ask about private portals, membership and the records they leave behind. Every term here is one you’ll meet while running a portal, defined once and linked to the part of FormaPortal it belongs to.
Portals
What a portal is, and the kinds there are
12 terms
- What is a client portal?
- A client portal is a private area of a firm’s website that clients sign into, where they find the documents, updates and forms that belong to them. Each client sees their own material and nobody else’s. Firms run one so that work stops travelling by email attachment.Client portals
- What is a member portal?
- A member portal is a private site for the members of a club, association or governing body. Members sign in to read what their membership entitles them to, renew it, book events and keep their own details current. What each member reaches follows the tier they’re on.Member portals
- What is an investor portal?
- An investor portal is a private area where shareholders and backers sign in to read reports, statements and announcements. The company decides who is admitted and what each investor can open, and every acceptance and download is logged, so the distribution list is a record rather than a memory.Investor portals
- What is a vendor portal?
- A vendor portal is a private area where suppliers register, send in their documents and are cleared before they start work. Onboarding runs as a sequence: the supplier completes each step, you read what arrives, and access opens once everything you asked for is there.Vendor portals
- What is a customer portal?
- A customer portal is a private area where the people who buy from you sign in to find their orders, documents and updates instead of emailing to ask. It’s the same thing as a client portal: firms say client when they work case by case, and customer when they sell at volume.Client portals
- What is a partner portal?
- A partner portal is a private area for the organisations you work through rather than sell to: resellers, agents, affiliates, franchisees. Each partner signs in to the material and the rates that apply to them, and each one can be an organisation account with several named people inside it.Partner portals
- What is a self-service portal?
- A self-service portal lets people do things for themselves instead of asking somebody to do it for them: find a document, update their details, book a place, pay a fee. The work moves out of your inbox, and the answer is there whenever the person looks for it.
- What is an extranet?
- An extranet is a private part of a company’s systems opened up to outsiders: clients, suppliers, partners. It’s the older word for what most people now call a portal, and the two mean the same thing in practice. A place outside your walls that only the people you name can reach.
- What is the difference between an intranet and a portal?
- An intranet is a private site for your own staff. A portal is for the people outside your organisation: clients, members, investors, suppliers. The difference is who signs in. Plenty of organisations run both, and the portal is the one the outside world actually meets.
- What is the difference between a portal and a website?
- A website is public and shows everybody the same thing. A portal sits behind a sign-in and shows each person what belongs to them: their documents, their tier, their history. Most organisations run both, the website doing the selling and the portal holding the relationship afterwards.
- What is a no-code portal?
- A no-code portal is one you build and change from a dashboard instead of writing software. You set the domain, the branding, the content, the forms and the permissions yourself. There’s nothing to install or host, and no development project standing between deciding something and doing it.Everything the portal does
- What is multi-tenant SaaS?
- Multi-tenant SaaS is software where every customer runs on one shared platform while their data stays separate and private. You get your own portal, domain and branding without running servers, and improvements and security fixes reach you without an upgrade project of your own.
Access
How somebody ends up with an account
9 terms
- What is gated access?
- Gated access means the portal sits behind a sign-in: only people with an account reach what’s inside. You decide how accounts come about, whether anyone can register or applications are read first, and what each account opens once it exists.How access works
- What is an application form?
- An application form is what somebody fills in to ask for access. It collects whatever you need in order to decide: company details, a document upload, an agreement to your terms. The answers arrive as a record you can read, keep and return to later.
- What is approval before access?
- Approval before access means a person reads an application before an account opens. It’s optional: a portal can take open registration and let people in straight away instead. Where it’s switched on, approving somebody puts them on a tier, and a decline can carry your reason.
- What is onboarding?
- Onboarding is everything between somebody arriving and being ready to use the portal properly: the form they complete, the terms they accept, the documents you need from them, the first things they should read. Run as an ordered sequence, each step opens when the one before it is done.How onboarding runs
- What is passwordless sign-in?
- Passwordless sign-in lets people in with a code or a link sent to their email address rather than a password they have to remember. You can offer it alongside passwords or on its own. Either way, it takes forgotten-password email out of your week.
- What is a magic link?
- A magic link is a single-use link emailed to somebody that signs them in when they click it. There’s nothing to remember and nothing to reset. Links expire after a short window, and you can offer them alongside passwords or instead of them entirely.
- What is a membership tier?
- A membership tier is a group that decides what the people in it can reach. Every account sits on one: full and associate, standard and premium, whatever yours are called. Content is published to tiers rather than to individuals, so moving somebody up changes what they can open.Membership tiers
- What is an organisation account?
- An organisation account is one account shared by several people: a client company, a member firm, a building. It has its own owners and members, and its own documents and agreements. You can ask for an agreement once per organisation instead of chasing everybody in it.How organisations are counted
- What is role-based access?
- Role-based access means what somebody can do follows the role they hold rather than being decided person by person. On the dashboard, an owner, an admin and a member of staff reach different things. On the portal side, the same idea is the tier a contact sits on.
Branding
Whose name the portal carries
6 terms
- What is a custom domain?
- A custom domain is a web address you own, used for the portal itself: members.yourname.com rather than an address with a software company’s name in it. People arrive on your domain, sign in on your domain, and never leave it.Domains and branding
- What is a subdomain?
- A subdomain is a section of a domain you already own: members.yourname.com, portal.yourname.com. Running the portal on one keeps it under your name without touching the website on your main address, and it’s pointed at the portal with a DNS record rather than a rebuild.
- What does white label mean?
- White label means the software carries your name and appearance instead of the supplier’s: your logo, your colours and typeface, your domain, your sending address. The people you let in deal with your organisation throughout.
- What is a sending domain?
- A sending domain is the domain that portal email goes out from. Connect your own and invitations, notifications and announcements arrive from your address rather than a generic one. That is what recipients recognise, and what mail providers check when they decide where a message lands.
- What is email authentication?
- Email authentication is how a receiving mail server checks that a message really came from the domain it claims. SPF and DKIM are the records you publish in your DNS to prove it. Connect your sending domain and portal email passes those checks, which is what keeps it out of spam folders.
- What is a private portal?
- A private portal is one where nothing is readable until somebody signs in. A public one has pages anybody can read, with the rest kept behind the login. You choose which yours is, page by page, and you can change your mind later without rebuilding anything.
Publishing
What the people you let in get
8 terms
- What is a document library?
- A document library is the organised store of files a portal publishes: policies, statements, reports, contracts. A file is uploaded once and used wherever it belongs, and you can see everywhere it appears before you change or remove it.
- What is content gating?
- Content gating is publishing an item to some people and not others. Every page, document, event and announcement is public, open to everyone signed in, or limited to particular tiers. Anybody without access doesn’t see a locked item at all, so one portal serves several audiences.
- What is an announcement?
- An announcement is a notice published inside the portal: a decision, a deadline, something people need to know. It goes to the tiers you choose rather than to everybody, and it stays where it was published, so nobody has to find it again in an inbox.
- What is event ticketing?
- Event ticketing is publishing an event, taking the bookings and collecting the money in one place. Tickets can be free or paid, limited to particular tiers, and priced differently for different members, which makes the guest list and the takings the same record.Events and ticketing
- What is an online store in a portal?
- A store inside a portal sells to people who are already signed in: kit, publications, digital downloads, the extras that go alongside membership. Prices can follow the tier somebody is on, and what they bought sits on the same record as everything else they do.Selling through the portal
- What is a member directory?
- A member directory is the searchable list of who else is in: names, organisations, and whichever details each person agrees to show. You decide which tiers can open it and what appears in it, so it can be visible to everyone signed in or reserved for one group.
- What is membership management?
- Membership management is the work of keeping a membership current: joining, renewing, moving somebody between tiers, lapsing them when they stop paying, reinstating them when they come back. Done in the portal, each of those is one action against one record.Membership features
- What is a learning management system?
- A learning management system, or LMS, is where training is published, completed and marked off. Run yours inside the portal and the courses use the same accounts and the same tiers as everything else, and completion is recorded against the person rather than left in somebody’s inbox.
Records
The proof underneath all of it
10 terms
- What is an audit trail?
- An audit trail is the running log of what happened and who did it: applications, approvals, changes to access, acceptances. Each entry carries the person, the time and what changed. It builds itself as people work, so the answer to who approved something is already written down.The record it keeps
- What is a consent record?
- A consent record is proof that a named person accepted a named version of your terms or privacy policy, stored with the time it happened. Publish a new version and the people it affects are asked again, so what somebody agreed to is never inferred from today’s wording.
- What is an answer snapshot?
- An answer snapshot is a copy of a submission exactly as it was given, questions included. Editing the form afterwards leaves earlier submissions alone, so an old application still reads with the questions that were actually put to that person.
- What is form versioning?
- Form versioning keeps each edition of a form separate instead of overwriting it. New submissions use the current version and older ones stay on file against theirs. When a change is material, you can ask everybody to complete the form again on the version that now applies.
- What is a contact history?
- A contact history is everything one person has done, kept on their own record: what they applied for, what they accepted, what they were sent, what they paid. It answers the question you get on the phone without anybody searching four systems for the answer.
- What is an internal note?
- An internal note is something your team writes on somebody’s record that the person never sees: the context behind a decision, a conversation worth remembering, a reason to check back later. The knowledge sits on the record rather than in the head of whoever took the call.
- What is compliance tracking?
- Compliance tracking is keeping sight of who has done what they’re required to do and who hasn’t: a policy accepted, a form completed, hours logged in a period. The requirement and the evidence sit in the same place, so you can filter down to whoever is overdue.
- What is a periodic goal?
- A periodic goal is a target somebody has to meet inside a set period: hours of training in a year, a form submitted each quarter, a document reviewed each season. The portal counts progress towards it, so you can see who has reached the target and who hasn’t.
- What is a CPD record?
- CPD stands for continuing professional development, the training somebody does to stay qualified. A CPD record is the log of it per person, with their evidence attached and the hours counted towards whatever you require in each period.
- What is a data export?
- A data export is your own information taken out in full, in a file you can use elsewhere: contacts, submissions, payments, records. Everything in your portal can leave it at any time, with no restrictions and no need to ask us first.
Plans
The words that decide what it costs
7 terms
- What is a contact?
- A contact is a person with an account on the portal: a client, member, shareholder, tenant or supplier. Contacts are what a plan’s capacity is measured in. Your own colleagues are seats rather than contacts, and they’re counted separately.What each plan includes
- What is a seat?
- A seat is one of your own people with access to the dashboard: an owner, an admin or a member of staff. Seats run the portal and contacts use it. The two are counted separately, and your plan sets how many of each you get.Seats on each plan
- What is an allowance?
- An allowance is how much of something a plan includes: contacts, organisation accounts, seats, storage. Going over an allowance breaks nothing, you add capacity at the rate your plan shows. Plans differ by allowance rather than by features, so nothing is held back on a cheaper one.Allowances by plan
- What are membership dues?
- Membership dues are the recurring fee somebody pays to belong: an annual subscription, a monthly payment, a joining fee. Collected through the portal, they’re attached to the tier the member is on, so paying and being renewed are one event rather than two jobs.
- What is a payment commission?
- A payment commission is the share the platform takes of money collected through it, quoted as a percentage. Stripe charges its own processing fee separately, so the two add together. We quote our rate on its own, so you can see exactly what each party takes.Commission by plan
- What is a payment processing fee?
- A payment processing fee is what the card processor charges to move the money, taken by Stripe on each transaction. It’s separate from any platform commission, so the two add together. Seeing them quoted apart is the only way to know what each party actually takes.
- What is a discount code?
- A discount code is a code somebody enters at checkout to pay less: a joining offer, a concession, a members’ rate. You decide which plans, products or events each code applies to, who can redeem it and for how long, so an offer runs without your published prices changing.
Still deciding
See the terms as features
The glossary explains the vocabulary. The features page shows what each of these looks like in a portal you run yourself, and the pricing page shows what it costs.