Should Multiple People Have Access to Your Client Portal? (Pros, Cons & How-To)
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This question came up in my community recently: can we invite multiple people to the same project in our Kitchen* client portal? And more importantly, should we invite more than one point of contact?
I run into this sometimes with the systems questions I get from other designers. If you're working with a bigger client, there might be a whole team or department involved, and suddenly the tidy one-contact-per-project setup you've built your portal around doesn't fit that project.
To answer this question (about the 'how'), I pulled up my own Kitchen portal and tested a few different ways to handle it. And because I was surprised with the options available, I decided to make a tutorial for you & show you how to do it, if you find yourself in this position.
Here's what I found, including a permissions trick I genuinely wasn't sure would work until I tried it! 👏🏻
First, Should You Add Multiple People to One Client Portal Project? 🤔
Before we get into the how, let's talk about the should.
This isn't a "just do it because you technically can" situation; there's a real argument on both sides, and whichever one wins that argument depends entirely on your specific project and client.
The Case for Multiple Contacts
The biggest argument for inviting more than one person into a project is transparency. When everyone involved can see the same tasks, the same files, and the same conversation thread, nobody's working off secondhand information. That builds trust, especially with clients who have their own internal teams (think: an in-house marketing person, a business partner, maybe someone from their ops side) who all need eyes on the project.
It also cuts down on the catch-up process for the group; the "wait, did anyone tell Sarah about that?" problem. If Sarah has portal access, Sarah already knows. —As an example, of course; no Sarahs were involved in the testing of this theory. 😂
The Case Against Multiple Contacts
On the flip side—and it's a BIG flip side—decision by committee is usually chaos for the service provider. 😬
The second you open a project up to multiple people, you're opening yourself up to conflicting feedback and opinions. One person says the homepage needs more white space, another says it needs more color, a third person "just has some thoughts" they'll share "by next Thursday." Now you're not designing anymore. You're mediating and waiting for a group of people to agree with each other, while your original deadline isn't necessarily able to budge just because they can't decide.
Communication also bloats fast. What used to be one clear message thread turns into five different people weighing in, and you're the one who has to sort through it, figure out who actually has decision-making authority, and land somewhere that doesn't leave three other people annoyed with you, or you feeling resentful of the project's direction because of this chaos.
You decide
I'm not going to tell you multiple contacts is always a bad idea. I'm also not going to talk you into it.
It genuinely depends on the project, the client, and what you actuallyagreed to in your scope of work (service agreement/contract) before the project even started. If you locked in one single point of contact from the jump, that's usually the smoother path and if the client has already signed that agreement, you can lean on your own contract for backup if they come back & try to change the plan.
But some projects, especially ones involving multiple departments or a client with a team, might genuinely need more than one person in the loop, and THAT situation is why I'm making today's tutorial.
How to Invite Multiple Contacts to the Same Kitchen Project 👥👥
If you landed on "yes, this project needs more than one contact," here's exactly how to set it up in Kitchen.
Step 1: Head to the Project's Share Menu
Go to the top-level folder of your project. If you're using Kitchen correctly, most projects will be a folder with a nested group of items inside it.
Once you're there, click the three-dot icon ••• and select Share.
If the person you're inviting doesn't already exist in your Kitchen account, you can create their client profile right from this same menu. No need to bounce over to your Client list in Kitchen first.
If the person you're inviting has already been invited to the portal for a past project, then you can just use the search bar to find them; no need to create them as a 'new' Client again!
Step 2: Set Individual Permission Levels
For each person you create as a new Client, you'll type in their name and email, then assign a permission role for that user. Kitchen lets you get pretty granular with permissions & roles, so these are the ones I'd suggest starting with for this type of situation (multiple clients being added to a single project):
Viewer/read-only access — Grant anyone that did NOT sign your service agreement/contract view-only permissions. This way, they can see everything happening in the project, but they can't upload files, download files, leave comments, send messages, or complete tasks. This is the "you can watch, but you can't touch" option. 🤭
Full participation access — Grant your 'main' Client Uploader or Creator permissions. This is the person who signed the service agreement/contract with you. This way, they can fully engage & collaborate with you:
Uploader permissions = viewing, uploading & downloading files, commenting on files & tasks, messaging, and completing assigned tasks.
Creator permissions = everything Uploader permissions allow, but they can also create tasks in a Board and manage those tasks they create. They can't manage tasks you've created & assigned to yourself though, and of course they can't change other people's permissions levels or their own.
Commenter-only access = only allow messaging and file or task comments, so your clients with this level of access won't be able to 'complete' tasks you assign to them, only comment.
If your goal is "yes, you get visibility, but I'm NOT opening the floodgates to five people all giving me feedback at once," then viewer-only access is your best bet. It lets you be transparent with the group, just without inviting unnecessary chaos.
Step 3: Set Individual's Notification Defaults
When you create a new client during the project invitation process, it will also allow you to set an email notification preference. I typically just use the default "messages and mentions" for most people. "Everything" tends to be overkill and trains people to ignore their inbox, while the "Nothing" option defeats the purpose of inviting them at all.
After you've invited the client, you can always impersonate them to further adjust the notifications for them and make sure they won't be bombarded.
Group Clients Under One Company for Cleaner Management
If you're adding multiple people from the same organization, do yourself a favor and assign them all to a single company inside Kitchen, especially if you plan to or think you may work with them again in the future.
If the company doesn't already exist, you can create it in seconds right from that same Client invite window (name and website are the only required fields, though you can add more if you want).
This matters for two reasons. First, it keeps your client address book well organized. Second, (and this is the part that actually saves you time later) it sets you up for the easier bulk-permissions trick I'm sharing next!
The Trick: Bulk Client Invites & Team vs. Individual Permissions
I genuinely wasn't sure my idea would work, and I'm still a little surprised it did. 😄
If you're working with a company that has three people attached to it, and you want the whole group to have basic viewer access, but you want ONE specific person (say, the actual project lead) to have full participation access so they can upload files and complete tasks, then this trick will help you set it up.
First, this method assumes you've already added the individual people to your Client list for past projects or whatever other reason. Once the individuals are added as Clients, they can also be tied to the same Company, and once that's set, the rest of this will make more sense.
From the project, you can invite the entire company to the project with viewer-only permissions across the board, or whatever level of permissions you want most people to have. Then go back into the Share menu and invite the individual Client(s) and grant them different permissions (such as Uploader or Creator) if they need to also engage/interact with you in the portal. Because you separately added them as an individual Client in addition, and assigned specific permissions to that individual, it overrides the lower permission level you assigned to the rest of the Company.
As an example, if Hermione, Harry, Ron, and Neville are all in the same company, but your main point of contact is only Hermione (because let's face it, she's the only one I want to work with from this group if we're on a tight schedule, LOL), then you can invite them in 'bulk' as a Company to the project with Viewer permissions, and then also add Hermione 'again' as an individual client with different Uploader or Creator permissions. This way, Hermione will be able to engage & interact in the portal, but Ron, Neville and Harry will only be able to log in & see everything.
So with this tactic, everyone from the company shows up in the project with viewer-only access, but that one person you added individually can show up with the higher permission level layered on top.
I tested this by impersonating several of the test accounts with different permissions levels, and it worked exactly the way I hoped! The tasks assigned to that Uploader Client showed up with full functionality (upload attachments, leave comments, mark complete), while the tasks NOT assigned to them only allowed comments and uploads, not completion. For the rest, they could see what they needed to, but didn't have permission to engage with us.
So to recap the process:
Add the entire company to the project with baseline (typically viewer-only) permissions
Go back into the Share menu for that project and individually add the one person who needs elevated access levels for collaboration
Assign that person their higher permission level separately, which overrides their view-only permissions from the Company invite.
That's it! It gives you the transparency benefit of "everyone can see what's happening" without the Sirius 🐕🦺 chaos risk of "everyone can act a fool in here with me." 😂
P.S. Did ya catch all those Harry Potter references? ⚡️🤓
An Alternative Route: Create Clients First, Invite Later
I mentioned this kinda in passing earlier, but here's one more workflow worth knowing about: if you've already created all your clients in your address book ahead of time and assigned them to the same company, you can skip straight to adding the whole company to a project at once, rather than inviting each person one by one.
You can also batch-send the same invitation message to multiple people at once when you invite the company to a project, as long as they already exist in your Kitchen account. Each individually-added client gets their own notification subject and message, so unless you copy/paste the same message for each one, you'll end up repeating work — unless, of course, everyone genuinely needs a different message.
Whether you invite them individually or add them by company first, neither approach is objectively better, depending on your situation. It's really just about which workflow fits how you naturally organize your client information and what size Client (group) you typically work with.
🚨 Important!
Kitchen's Lifetime Plan Is Retiring Soon!
If you've been on the fence about trying Kitchen*, this is your hard nudge to stop dickin' around and waiting to make your decision. 😂
Kitchen has officially announced that they're retiring their lifetime access plan soon. There's no confirmed date yet (I've asked directly, and they don't have a timeline locked in yet), but once it's gone, it's gone.
Existing lifetime customers keep their lifetime access permanently.
New customers after the cutoff will move to a monthly payment subscription instead.
If a client portal without an ongoing monthly bill is appealing to you, now's the time to grab it while lifetime access still exists!
The Bottom Line
Multiple contacts on one project isn't a yes-or-no rule you can apply across your whole business or to every project situation. It's a case-by-case call based on your specific client, project scope, and how much bandwidth you have to manage extra voices in the mix.
I hope this tutorial gave you the toolkit to make that call and implement it IF needed, whether that means locking things down to one point of contact or opening a project up to a whole team, with the right permission structure in place either way.
If you want to try this out for yourself, you can grab a free Kitchen account and lock in your lifetime access before it disappears. 👉🏼 launchthedamnthing.com/kitchen
