Your customer wants to sign in to the portal

Where they go

Send them yourshop.benchworks.app/portal. That’s their front door. They land on a page with two tabs: Sign in and Look up a repair.

The sign-in flow

On the Sign in tab they type either their phone number or their email — whichever you have on file for them. We send a 6-digit one-time code to that channel (WhatsApp if it’s a phone, email if it’s an email). They type the code on the next screen, hit Verify, and they’re in.

The session lasts 30 days. They can sign out manually from the portal, or it’ll expire on its own.

What they can see

Once signed in, they see a dashboard with three things at the top: active repairs, pending estimates, unpaid invoices. Plus a feed of the last ten updates on their jobs (status changes, customer-visible notes from your team).

• Repairs tab — every ticket they’ve ever had with you, with current status and the activity timeline for each one.
• Estimates tab — pending estimates they need to approve or decline, plus a history of past ones.
• Invoices tab — unpaid invoices with a Pay button, plus a history of paid ones with PDF download.
• Profile tab — read-only summary of what we have on them (last 4 of phone, first character of email). They can’t edit it from the portal in v1 — they have to ask you.

They don’t want an account?

They don’t need one. The signed-URL lookup flow (see "Look up a repair without signing in") still works exactly as before. The OTP portal is for customers who want it; the lookup flow is for customers who don’t.