Customer Self-Service Account Portal

Why customers keep emailing you for things they should be able to see

Most businesses running Zoho end up with their customer's information scattered across three places. Invoices, credit notes and payment history sit in Zoho Books. Support tickets sit in Zoho Desk. The relationship, contract terms, assets and renewal dates sit in Zoho CRM. Each of those has a portal of sorts, each with its own login and its own look, and none of them shows the customer everything at once.

The practical result is inbound noise. Customers email accounts asking for a copy of an invoice they were sent last month. They call to ask whether a payment was received. They reply to an old ticket thread instead of raising a new one. They ask for a signed contract or a compliance certificate that already exists in your files. Your finance and support teams spend a meaningful part of every week answering questions that a well-built portal would answer instantly, and the customer's impression is of a company that is hard to deal with.

What ECOSIRE builds

ECOSIRE builds a single branded self-service portal on the Zoho platform that presents one login to your customer and speaks to Books, Desk and CRM behind the scenes. It is built to order against your account structure, your document set and your brand - not configured from a template.

One login, one identity

The portal is delivered as a Zoho Creator application, with the option of Sigma widgets embedded into an existing Zoho surface where that suits you better. A portal user is resolved to a Contact in Zoho CRM and to the matching Customer in the Zoho Books organization, so a single login sees the right financial records and the right relationship records. Multi-contact accounts are supported: a finance contact can be given the billing screens while an operations contact only sees tickets and documents. Access is enforced in Deluge on the server, keyed to the resolved customer ID, so no client-side manipulation can widen what a user sees.

Billing that answers its own questions

The billing area reads Invoices, Estimates, Credit Notes, Payments Received and Customer Statements from the Zoho Books API for that customer only. Each invoice can be viewed on screen and downloaded as the Books-generated PDF, with your template, your logo and your tax presentation intact. Ageing is grouped into buckets so the customer can see exactly what is current and what is overdue. Where you have GST, VAT or another tax regime configured in the Books organization, the portal presents the tax breakdown and the tax registration details as Books computes them rather than recalculating anything - which is the only safe way to handle it.

Paying without a phone call

Where your Books organization has a supported payment gateway configured, the portal exposes a pay action against one invoice or a selected set. On successful payment the Payment Received record is created in Books against the correct invoice, and a Deluge function updates the portal view and fires a receipt notification. Part payments and payments against a statement balance are handled if your process allows them. If you do not take online payments, the same screen instead presents your bank details and a remittance-advice upload so the customer can tell you what they have paid and against what.

Support without a second login

The support area is backed by Zoho Desk. Customers raise a ticket through a form mapped to your Desk departments, ticket types and custom fields, see the full thread with attachments, reply inline, and see the status and, where you publish them, the SLA response expectations. Existing Desk workflows, assignment rules and escalations continue to run untouched - the portal is a front end onto Desk, not a parallel ticketing system. Where you maintain a Desk knowledge base, relevant articles are surfaced on the ticket form so common questions deflect before a ticket is created.

Documents and account details

Contracts, signed quotations, compliance certificates, delivery notes, warranty documents and onboarding packs are published from Zoho WorkDrive, scoped per customer, so the current version is always what they download. The account screen shows the CRM-held details the customer is allowed to see and, where you want it, allows them to submit changes to billing address, contact details or tax registration as a request that lands in CRM for your team to approve rather than as a direct overwrite.

Automation behind the scenes

Zoho Flow handles the choreography - invoice issued, payment received, ticket replied, document published - so the customer is notified through email or your preferred channel without anyone remembering to send it. Scheduled Deluge functions handle recurring work such as statement generation reminders and overdue nudges, and every nudge respects whatever suppression or preference rules you specify.

Branding that does not look bolted on

The portal carries your logo, colour palette, typography and domain presentation, so it reads as part of your business rather than as a generic system screen. Layout is responsive because a meaningful share of customers will open an invoice link on a phone.

Who this is for

Professional services firms billing retainers and project fees; SaaS and subscription businesses with recurring invoices in Books; distributors and wholesalers with regular account customers; equipment and maintenance businesses combining invoices with service tickets; and any team where finance and support are answering the same handful of customer questions repeatedly.

How delivery works

1. Scoping call. We map your Zoho footprint - which of CRM, Books and Desk you run, how many Books organizations, how customers and contacts are currently linked, which documents you publish, and whether you take online payments.

2. Fixed quote. A written scope covering screens, data sources, permission model, branding, assumptions and exclusions, priced fixed. Anything outside it is quoted before work starts.

3. Build. Development happens in a sandbox or separate Creator environment against a copy of your configuration, with review points so you see real screens with real data shapes early.

4. Install in test. The portal is installed into your test setup and seeded with a handful of real customers so you can run invoice viewing, payment, ticket raising and document download yourself.

5. Production go-live. After sign-off we install into production, resolve the CRM-to-Books customer mapping against live data, invite the first cohort of customers, and monitor the first billing cycle with you.

6. Support. A defect-fix support window is included after go-live; new features are quoted separately.

Typical delivery is 2-4 weeks from confirmed scope, with payment-gateway work and multi-organization Books setups sitting at the longer end.