Client Portal and Project Management
A professional services firm with 80 consultants serving enterprise clients was struggling with the overhead of keeping clients informed. Their reputation was built on transparency and responsiveness, but the manual effort required to maintain that standard was consuming a disproportionate share of their project management capacity.
The Challenge
Every Friday afternoon, the project management team sat down to compile client status reports. This involved pulling task progress from Jira, extracting time and budget data from their billing system, and gathering deliverable status from a shared drive. Each report was assembled manually in a Word document, reviewed by a senior manager, and emailed to the client before close of business.
Across the firm's 25 active client engagements, this process consumed approximately 15 hours per week -- nearly two full days of project management time dedicated purely to reporting. And despite the effort, the reports were inherently stale; by the time a client received their Friday update, the information was already a day old at best.
Clients frequently called between reports to ask about specific deliverables or budget burn rates, and project managers had to dig through multiple tools to answer what should have been simple questions. The firm's Net Promoter Score survey consistently showed that "communication and transparency" was the area clients most wanted improved, despite the significant time already invested.
Our Solution
We built a branded client portal using Next.js and TypeScript, deployed on Vercel for fast global access. The portal gives each client a secure, personalised dashboard showing their projects in real time, eliminating the need for manual weekly reports entirely.
The data layer uses Prisma ORM with PostgreSQL, providing a clean abstraction over the firm's data model. Rather than replacing the internal tools the team already used, we built integration pipelines that pull data from their existing systems. Task progress syncs from Jira via webhook, time entries flow from the billing system through a nightly batch process, and document uploads are managed directly within the portal using secure pre-signed URLs for storage.
Each client dashboard displays project milestones with completion status, an interactive timeline showing upcoming deliverables, current budget utilisation with visual indicators, and a document library organised by project phase. A notification system alerts clients when key milestones are reached or new deliverables are available for review.
Role-based access control ensures that each client sees only their own projects and documents. Within the firm, project managers have an admin view that surfaces all client activity, flagging accounts that may need proactive outreach based on engagement patterns. The entire application is server-rendered for performance and SEO, with TypeScript providing end-to-end type safety from the database schema through to the UI components.
Results
The weekly reporting ritual was eliminated within a month of launch. Project managers reclaimed approximately 60% of the time previously spent on client communication overhead, redirecting that capacity toward billable work. Client satisfaction scores improved measurably in the next quarterly survey, with several clients specifically citing the portal as a reason for increased confidence in the firm. The portal also became an unexpected sales tool -- prospective clients who saw the portal during the pitch process consistently rated it as a differentiator. Within six months, the firm reported a 15% increase in client retention rates.