Is it possible to use Dropbox as a client portal?

[MoSal]

Hi all, hope you are well.

We’re a firm of Accountants based in the United Kingdom. We are coming to the end of our contract for a software which included a client portal. On this portal clients would upload their business documents for us to process. This ensured we were complaint with GDPR.

The new software we are using doesn’t have a portal.

We were wondering how we could organise Dropbox to work in a similar manner. We have over 2000 individual clients; how can this be organised?

The managing partner of the firm already has a premium Dropbox account.

I have searched the forum and cannot find a suitable answer to my question, so any help is greatly approached.

Thanks in advance, Moe.

[Jay]

Hi @MoSal, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Could you clarify exactly what you mean by a portal, and how it would work for a client?

Are you referring to something like a file request link where users can upload documents to your Dropbox account?

This will help me to assist further!

[MoSal]

So the clients have thier own login to the portal, they can only access the companies that we give them access to and they would upload thier documents into the file called 'Files from Client', we would then get a notificaiton that the client has uploaded documents and we login to download them. Redacted pictures attached, Capture 1 is the root files, Capture 2 is the uploaded documents. 

[Jay]

Thanks for the details. Currently this isn't possible with the normal usage of Dropbox, the closest feature we have is the file request feature I mentioned earlier.

It might be possible to create a portal with a custom app created using the Dropbox API. 

[MoSal]

Ok, thank you for your help.

We don't want to get into developing or API's its too advanced for us.

What if we setup a group account for the VAT team for example, created files for all the clients that send us documents via the portal and gave each client access to thier folder via thier email address. 

Assuming the client can operate dropbox and add files/documents when needed, I think this is probably the closest solution we have, what do you think?

[Jay]

This should be possible. Shared folders can be sent to specific users with their own Dropbox accounts. 

Just be aware that shared folders with edit permissions means that users can also delete and edit existing files in the folder. 

Additionally, any quota isn't transferred to other users in shared folders, so if you use more than 2 GB of quota for the shared folders, then those users will need a paid plan to sync the shared folder.