Partner Portal

The Partner Portal lets external organisations, such as lead generation companies or referral partners, submit (upload) leads straight into ORCA without having a user account. It is the standard way to allow partners to feed leads in without giving them a login. Each partner gets their own private URL. When they submit a form, a contact and a section record land in ORCA automatically, ready for your team to pick up.

How it works (the short version)

You create a Partner Feed in Settings. That feed is tied to one of your custom sections (e.g. Leads, Solar Enquiries). ORCA generates a unique URL for the feed. You send that URL to your partner. They fill in the form, hit submit, and the lead appears in ORCA as a record in the target section, with a linked contact already created.

No ORCA login required on the partner's side. No manual import. No spreadsheet.

Setting up a Partner Feed

Go to Settings > Partner Portal to see all your existing feeds, or click Create New Feed to start a fresh one.

Step 1: Name and target section

Give the feed a descriptive name (e.g. "Acme Lead Feed") and pick the section where incoming leads should land. The section you pick determines which fields will be available on the partner's form.

Step 2: Notifications

Choose which team member should be notified when a new lead arrives, and how: by email, SMS, or both. Leave this blank if you'd rather check ORCA at your own pace.

Step 3: Save to get the URL

After saving the feed for the first time, ORCA displays the Partner Direct URL. This is what you send to the partner. It looks like:

https://orca-crm.com/p/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

Copy it using the button next to the field and share it directly with your partner contact.

Configuring fields (Defaults and Visibility)

Once a feed is saved, the edit screen shows a table of all the fields from your target section. For each field you can:

Visible to partner -- tick this to show the field on the partner's intake form. Fields that are not ticked are hidden from the partner entirely.

Locked -- tick this alongside a default value to pre-fill the field and prevent the partner from changing it. This is useful for tagging all incoming leads with a source label (e.g. "Partner A") or a default status, automatically.

Default value -- set a value that pre-fills the field. If the field is locked, this value is always written to the record, regardless of what the partner submits.

The contact details (first name, last name, email, phone, address) are always collected and are not part of the field preset list. They go straight onto the contact record.

What the partner sees

The partner opens their URL in a browser. No login is required. They see a form with:

• Contact fields: first name, last name, email, phone, and address
• Any section fields you marked as Visible to partner

On submission, ORCA:

1. Creates or updates a contact record (matched by email)
2. Creates a new record in the target section
3. Links the contact to the record
4. Fires any configured notifications
5. Returns a confirmation to the partner

Duplicate submissions (same email, postcode, and time slot within 60 seconds) are silently ignored, so there is no risk of the same lead appearing twice.

Combining with the Sales tool (booked appointments)

If your account uses the Sales tool, partners can book a sales appointment at the same time as submitting a lead.

The partner's form includes a calendar picker that shows available slots for your sales reps. The partner picks a slot, and on submission:

• The lead record is created in ORCA as normal
• A calendar event is booked and linked directly to that record
• The availability block is marked as used, so the same slot cannot be double-booked

On the ORCA side, the appointment shows up in the relevant rep's calendar, already tied to the lead. No manual diary management needed.

For this to work, the Sales tool needs to have availability blocks set up in ORCA. Your team adds blocks of availability (e.g. a rep is free Tuesday 10am to 3pm), and the portal automatically offers those as bookable slots to the partner.

The rep whose slot was booked gets a meeting invite by email, so the appointment lands in their own calendar as well as ORCA's. See Calendar for how invites work.

The customer can be confirmed to as well. By default a portal booking notifies your team and nobody else, so the householder who picked a slot hears nothing more until somebody turns up. Switching on Email the customer when an appointment is booked in Settings > General sends them a confirmation with the time, the place, the name of whoever is coming, and a calendar file. It's off unless you turn it on, since it writes to your customers rather than your team. See Confirming the Booking to the Customer for the detail.

When availability runs out

A rep with no published slots left is invisible to the portal. Partners see nothing to book, and the enquiries quietly go elsewhere, which is easy to miss because nothing appears to be broken.

ORCA watches for this. When a rep's published slots are about to run out, they get a to-do telling them when their availability ends, so there is time to publish more before it becomes a problem. A rep who has already run dry gets a to-do saying so.

A few details:

• One open nudge per rep at a time. Completing it makes them eligible for another later, so it does not pile up.
• Reps who have never published availability are left alone. This is for people who were publishing and stopped.
• How much notice you get is set in Settings > General, under Booking availability: Warn this many days ahead, seven by default.
• Also tell in the same block nominates a second person to receive the warning. Worth setting, because the rep who has stopped publishing is often the last to notice.

This applies to any account using the Sales tool. There is nothing to switch on.

Managing feeds

From Settings > Partner Portal you can see all your feeds at a glance, with their active or inactive status.

Deactivate a feed if a partner relationship ends. Deactivated feeds still exist in ORCA but reject new submissions. You can reactivate at any time.

Rotate UUID if a feed URL has been compromised or shared more widely than intended. Rotating generates a new UUID, which invalidates the old URL immediately. You will need to share the new URL with your partner.

View logs to see every submission that has come through a feed: timestamp, contact name, whether it succeeded, and any errors. Useful for diagnosing issues if a partner reports a missing lead.

Delete removes the feed permanently. Existing records and contacts created by that feed remain in ORCA.

Custom Sections and the Partner Portal

The portal works with any custom section in ORCA. If you have a "Solar Leads" section with fields like Property Type, Roof Type, and EPC Rating, you can expose exactly those fields to your partner, set defaults where appropriate, and lock fields the partner should not touch.

A few tips:

• Keep the visible fields to a minimum. Partners fill in forms quickly, and long forms lead to drop-off. Lock anything ORCA can infer automatically (lead source, default status).
• Use a picklist field for lead source and lock it to the partner's name. This means you can filter in Reports by source instantly, without relying on anyone typing it correctly.
• If you want new partner leads to arrive with a specific status (e.g. "New"), set that picklist field's default and lock it.

Related

• Creating Sections -- how to set up the section your partner feed will write into
• Creating Templates -- how to define the fields that will appear on the partner form
• Meetings -- for logging follow-up calls and visits once a lead is in ORCA