Client Portal

Client Onboarding & Documents

Two of the fiddliest jobs in the salon — typing out a new client's details and chasing signed consent forms — happen in one place in Woofle. The Onboarding page lets you ask a client to fill in their own details, prepare any documents you need them to approve, and send them a single link to their portal to do the lot.

One page, one message, and you're always the final word. Everything a client fills in lands in a holding area for you to check, and every document waits for their deliberate approval. Nothing touches their real record, and nothing is texted, until you choose. When you're ready, a single message sends them their portal link for all of it at once.

The onboarding page: your client-portal hub

Every client has an Onboarding button on their record. It opens a single page that gathers everything you might ask a client to do on their portal:

Client Details and a card for each pet — start onboarding on any of them to ask the client to fill in their own information.
Documents — prepare consent forms, terms or waivers for the client to read and approve.
Send Portal Request — a compose box at the bottom that sends the client one message with their personal portal link, covering whatever you've set up above.

The rest of this guide walks the page top to bottom: asking for details, preparing documents, then sending the request.

Requesting details (onboarding)

Onboarding is a three-step round trip: you start it, the client fills it in, and you review what comes back. That last step is the important bit — onboarding never edits a record behind your back, it just saves you the typing and lets you approve the result.

Start onboarding on what you need

Client Details and each pet sit as their own card, each with a Start Onboarding button. Press it on just the things you want filled in — perhaps one dog's details, or the client's contact info and both pets. Each one you start opens its form on the client's portal and shows on the page as awaiting their reply. You're never forced to ask for everything at once.
The client fills it in

On their portal the client sees a short to-do list of what you've asked for, with a form for their own details and one for each pet. The forms come pre-filled with whatever you already hold, so they're correcting and topping up rather than starting from blank — contact details, an alternative contact and their vet for themselves; date of birth, breed, colour, neutered and vaccinated status and medical notes for each dog. Before each form goes off, the portal asks them to confirm, and once it's in it can't be re-edited.
You review and approve

Their answers come back as a proposed set of changes for you to accept, field by field.

They can take their time. The client doesn't have to do it all in one sitting, and you don't have to wait by the screen. Each part they finish quietly appears on your side, ready whenever you next look.

Reviewing what comes back

You'll know there's something to look at in a few places: an Onboarding pending badge appears next to the client in your client list, a note shows on their record, and outstanding submissions gather on your dashboard so nothing slips through.

Back on the onboarding page, a part the client has submitted shows a neat review table with a row per field and two columns side by side:

Current — what's on the record right now.
Submitted — what the client just told you.

Rows where the client's answer differs are highlighted, so your eye goes straight to the real changes. Tick the answers you want to keep — or use the tick box in the header to select the whole lot — then press Accept. Only the rows you ticked are written onto the record; anything left unticked is ignored and the old value stays put. If a client updated their mobile but mistyped their postcode, you take the mobile and leave the postcode.

Not every submission needs keeping. Next to Accept is a Dismiss button, which clears a submission away without changing anything — handy if it was filled in by mistake. And if you've started a request the client hasn't answered yet and you've changed your mind, the awaiting card has a small Cancel link that switches that form back off on their portal.

Have a go straight away. A brand-new account comes with a few sample clients marked Demo, and a couple of those already have a completed onboarding submission waiting for you. So you can see the whole review flow — the dashboard alert, the "Onboarding pending" badge and the field-by-field accept-or-dismiss screen — without setting anything up first. When you've finished exploring, the demo clients (and their submissions along with them) all clear in one action from your dashboard, leaving your own records untouched.

Preparing documents

The Documents section of the same page is where you handle the paperwork — consent forms, terms, waivers. There's no scribbled signature pad: your client reads a document on their portal and taps Approve, and Woofle records that they approved it and on which date. That timestamped acknowledgement is the "signing".

It helps to keep two ideas apart:

A template is the master copy of a document — your standard consent form, say. You write it once and reuse it for any client.
A client document is one client's own copy, made from a template (or from scratch). It's what they actually read and approve, and it carries its own status and approval date.

So you set up templates rarely, and create client documents as you go.

Writing a template

Head to the Document Templates page, click Add Template, give it a name — "Grooming Consent Form", "Salon Terms" — and write the wording in the rich-text editor, just as you'd type a letter. Like messages, templates support tokens: placeholders in square brackets that Woofle swaps for real details the moment a document is created for a client. The editor lists the ones you can use, each with a one-tap copy button:

[ClientName] and [ClientFirstName] — the client's name
[BusinessName] — your salon's name
[CurrentDate] — the date the document is created

So a line like "I, [ClientName], give consent for [BusinessName] to groom my dog. Created [CurrentDate]." arrives already filled in with the real names and date.

Every template also has an Assign to new clients switch. Turn it on for a document you need everyone to approve — your standard consent form is the obvious one. From then on, each new client you add gets their own copy created automatically and waiting on their portal — there's no draft to write or submit, it goes straight to Pending Approval. Existing clients aren't touched; this only applies to clients added from that point forward.

Adding a document to a client

To give one particular client a document, open their Onboarding page and, under Documents, click Add Document. You'll be offered any of your templates, or a Blank Document if you'd rather start fresh. Pick one, and Woofle creates that client's own copy with the tokens already filled in.

The new document starts as a Draft — your private working copy. You can open it, tweak the name and wording, and it isn't visible to the client yet. When it reads exactly as you want, click Submit for Approval. That's the moment it becomes available to the client and changes to Pending Approval.

Drafts stay private. Nothing appears on the client's portal until you submit it for approval — and a draft won't be included when you send the portal request below. Take all the time you like getting the wording right; a draft is yours alone.

When the client opens the document on their portal they read it in full in the browser — no app to install, no PDF to download — and a note at the top asks them to review it and tap Approve Document once they're happy. One tap confirms; Woofle stamps the date, switches the document to Approved, and shows them a "You approved this document on…" confirmation. That approval is a deliberate action by the client — nothing is approved on their behalf.

Back on the onboarding page you can see at a glance where every document stands:

Draft — your private working copy, not yet sent.
Pending Approval — visible on the client's portal, waiting for them to approve.
Approved — the client has read and approved it, with the date recorded.

Open any approved document and you'll see the wording the client agreed to, locked as a read-only record. If you ever need to change an approved or pending document — a typo, an updated clause — use Unlock for Editing. That returns it to draft so you can amend it, after which you submit it again for the client to re-approve. Unlocking clears the previous approval, which is exactly what you want: the client should approve the version they're actually agreeing to.

Sending the portal request

Starting onboarding and submitting documents quietly puts things on the client's portal — but it doesn't tell them. That's the job of the Send Portal Request box at the bottom of the page. It's the same compose box you'll know from elsewhere in Woofle, pre-written from your onboarding template and carrying the client's personal portal link, so one message covers everything outstanding — details to fill in and documents to approve alike.

A couple of things worth knowing:

It waits until there's a point. Sending only becomes available when the client actually has something to do — a detail form you've started, or a document that's pending approval. A draft document isn't visible to them, so it doesn't count until you submit it.
You can send again. Come back and send another whenever you need a gentle reminder. As with every text in Woofle, sending uses your SMS credits (the cost is shown before you send), and nothing goes out on its own — it's always your deliberate choice.

If you'd rather not send a text right now — say the client is standing in front of you, or you'll email the link yourself — the toolbar at the top of the page also has Copy Link and Client Portal buttons so you can grab or open the portal link directly.

Putting it together

Write your standard forms as templates once and switch on Assign to new clients for the ones everyone needs. Then, for a new client, open their onboarding page, start onboarding on their details and pets, add any bespoke documents and submit them for approval, and send one portal request. The client fills in their details and taps approve on their forms from their own phone; you review what comes back field by field and you're left with accurate records and a tidy, dated record of who agreed to what — no printing, no scanning, no chasing, and no typing.

Want to see how the portal link and your branding fit into the bigger picture? There's more on the guides index.