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A client portal contact sees their own company’s shared projects, the deliverables you marked client-visible, the comments on those deliverables, and their invoices. Nothing else. They cannot see your cost rates, your margin, your hours, your team’s other clients, or any internal note – ever.

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The short answer

They CAN see

Their own projects, deliverable names and status, due dates, client-visible comments, and their invoices.

They CANNOT see

Cost rates, billing rates, margin, profit, tracked hours, estimates, budgets, assignees, tags, internal notes, and any other client.

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Why this is safe by design

A client role holds zero capabilities. It is not a reduced staff role – it is an empty one. There is no permission a portal contact could be granted that opens an internal screen. On top of that, the portal builds each screen from a short, fixed list of allowed fields. It does not take an internal record and hide parts of it. Anything not on the allowed list never reaches the browser.
This matters for a practical reason. If a new financial field is added to a project next year, it is not on the allowed list, so it cannot leak into the portal by accident.

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Exactly what a client sees

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On a project

Project status shows as one of: Draft, Planned, Active, On hold, Waiting on client, Completed, Cancelled or Archived.

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On a deliverable (a task)

Your internal sections are collapsed into three plain words before they reach the client. A client never sees your section names or your workflow. A task sitting in your “QA” section reads as In progress to them.

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On a comment

Only comments explicitly marked client-visible are returned. An internal note written on the same task is never sent to the portal. If a comment author cannot be resolved, the portal shows the collective label Project group instead of a name. Staff who only ever wrote internal notes are never named.

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On an invoice

A line’s origin is stripped. A client can see “Design – 12 hours – $1,200” but cannot tell whether it came from tracked time, an expense, or a manual line.

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The fields that can never appear

These are blocked by name across the whole portal. They cannot appear on any screen, at any depth, in any list:
  • Cost rate and billing rate
  • Actual cost, forecast cost, forecast margin
  • Margin and gross profit
  • Utilisation
  • Internal notes
  • Original estimate hours and current estimate hours
  • Scope flags
  • Assignee and collaborator identity
  • Billable flag
  • Phase or section identity
  • Mention data
  • The source of an invoice line, its time entry, its expense, and its exchange rate
  • The creator of a record

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Other clients and other projects

A portal contact can only reach:
  • Projects shared with them, and
  • Invoices belonging to a client that owns one of those projects.
Anything outside that set returns a plain access error. The error is deliberately vague – it does not tell the client whether the item exists at all. They see the message You don't have access to this with the text This item isn't shared with you. If you think that's a mistake, contact your project group.

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Example

Ruth Castillo is the portal contact for Bluebird Coffee at Northwind Studio. She opens the Website Redesign project and sees a deliverable called “Homepage wireframes”, marked In progress, due 14 March. She does not see that Sarah Lin is the assignee. She does not see that Sarah tracked 3 hours against it. She does not see the 300ofbillablevalue,the300 of billable value, the 135 of cost, or the 165ofmargin.Shedoesnotseethe165 of margin. She does not see the 40,000 project budget or how much of it is spent. She also does not see Harbor Logistics – Mobile App, or Fenwick Legal – Brand Refresh, because those belong to other clients.

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What you control

You decide what a client sees in three places:
1

Which client owns the project

Portal access follows the project’s client. See portal projects.
2

Which projects each contact can open

Untick a project for one contact on the client’s Portal access panel.
3

Which tasks and comments are client-visible

Only tasks marked client-visible appear as deliverables, and only client-visible comments are shown.

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Permissions

The client role itself holds no capabilities at all. See roles and capabilities.

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Common questions

No. There is no hours field anywhere in the portal, on any screen. Tracked time, timesheets and estimates are all absent.
Not from the task. Assignee and collaborator identity is blocked. They only learn a name when a staff member posts a client-visible comment, which is a deliberate choice you make when you write it.
No. Cost, margin, gross profit, forecast cost and utilisation are all blocked by name.
Yes. Draft invoices are not filtered out of the portal invoice list. Keep an invoice out of the portal by not creating it until you are ready.
Yes, if they are still shared on it. Archiving a project does not remove client access. Untick the project on the client’s Portal access panel to take it away.
No. There is no client directory, no member list, and no way to reach another company’s projects or invoices.

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Troubleshooting

Client portal overview

What the portal is and how it is gated.

Portal projects

How a project becomes visible to a client.

Portal invoices

What a client sees on an invoice.

Portal comments

Client-visible comments versus internal notes.

Roles and capabilities

Why the client role holds nothing.

Remove portal access

How to take access away.