Vendor Portal — Contractor & Vendor Accounts

What Is the Vendor Portal?

The Vendor portal is a stripped-down, separate portal for external contractors and vendors. A vendor logs in and sees only the projects they've been added to as a team member, the tickets linked to those projects, and a timesheet for logging their own hours — nothing else. They cannot see other tenants' data, internal staff notes, or anything they have not been explicitly granted.

Where to find it: /vendor-login (a separate login page, not the staff /login). The portal at /vendor only ever serves vendor users.

Concepts

• Vendor — a contractor or external supplier. Has a login account but is not a staff member of any tenant.
• Vendor membership — the link between a vendor user and a tenant. Grants them access to a scoped subset of that tenant's data.
• Vendor project — a portal project the vendor is a team member of. They see the project's tasks, time, and tickets, but not the tenant's other projects.
• Vendor ticket — a helpdesk ticket linked to a vendor project (or directly assigned to the vendor). The vendor sees the ticket, can add public comments, but cannot see internal notes or other tickets.

How Vendors Get Access

An admin invites a vendor:

1. Admin → Users → Invite user.
2. Email + role = VENDOR.
3. Save. The vendor receives an invitation email with a one-time link to set their password.

The vendor lands on /vendor-login after accepting. Their user account is then a VENDOR role in the admin tenancy, plus a per-tenant membership linking them to the customer(s) they work with.

A vendor does not need a MANAGER / AGENT role in any tenant. They have a VENDOR role in the admin tenancy, and per-tenant VENDOR memberships to grant them access to specific customer projects.

The Vendor Dashboard

After login, the vendor lands on /vendors — a simple dashboard with three KPI tiles:

• Projects — the count of projects they're a team member of.
• Tickets — the count of open tickets linked to those projects.
• Timesheets — this week's logged hours.

Plus a "Recent activity" panel listing the most recently updated items in their scope.

The Vendor Sidebar

The vendor sidebar has five entries only:

• Dashboard — /vendors
• Projects — /vendors/projects
• Tickets — /vendors/tickets
• Timesheets — /vendors/timesheet
• Profile — /vendors/profile

There is no launcher, no admin section, no customer directory. A vendor cannot navigate to anywhere outside their scope.

Vendor Project View

Open a project to see the standard portal project detail: status, priority, customer, contact, tasks, linked tickets, time entries. The vendor sees only this project — they cannot click through to the customer record, browse other projects, or see the tenant's other work.

Vendor Ticket View

A vendor's tickets are filtered to:

• Tickets linked to a project the vendor is a team member of.
• Tickets where the vendor is the assignee.

They see the public reply thread and can post public comments. Internal notes (the yellow-tinted agent-only comments) are hidden.

Vendor Timesheet

Identical UI to the staff timesheet, but the vendor's entries are auto-scoped to the vendor's projects. The vendor logs time against the project + task they're working on; the time rolls up into the customer's billing.

Permissions Summary

Vendor can	Vendor cannot
View projects they're a team member of	View other projects in the tenant
View tickets linked to those projects	View unrelated tickets
Post public comments on tickets	See internal agent notes
Log time against projects / tasks	See the tenant's other time entries
View their own profile	Edit tenant settings
Sign out	Switch into other vendor assignments (the sidebar doesn't expose this)

Setting Up a New Vendor

1. Invite the vendor as a VENDOR role in Admin → Users.
2. Add the vendor as a Team Member to the relevant project (Project detail page → Team tab → + Add Member → search for the vendor).
3. (Optional) Set the vendor as the Assignee on specific tickets you want them to handle.
4. Send the vendor a welcome message with the URL https://portal.kwgroup.org.uk/vendor-login.

See Also

• Projects — for adding a vendor as a team member
• Tickets — for assigning a ticket to a vendor
• Timesheets — same module, different scope