We can only have one client portal account per email because the email identifies the account uniquely for security reasons. The phone number can be repeated across different accounts, but not the email address. If you try to invite someone to the portal using an email that already exists in the client portal accounts database, you will get an error message in the software.
That said, sometimes you can work with couples or families that share an email address. In those cases, the following workarounds can allow you to give them access to the client portal.
In the examples below we consider that one person normally deals with the admin (e.g. meal plans, reports, questionnaires) and that the other(s) do not. This could be the case for couples, parents and kids, etc.
- You should consider if it would be possible to have different email addresses for each client (e.g. one for the wife and another for the husband in a couple, or individual accounts for family members) and then, when sending the client portal invitation, perhaps the person that doesn't deal with admin can just login once, download all of the documents as a pdf, and give this to the other person. This would require just a bit of involvement from the person that does not deal with admin, just to login once.
- Maybe in some cases the person doing the admin has 2 different email addresses of their own. You could use two different ones in some cases if the clients don't mind.
- You could create a single record for couples/families and call it "John and Mary Smith" or "Smith Family" or similar. Then, you can have separate questionnaires for wife and husband, parent and kid, etc (you can create a copy of your existing questionnaires). This way, the person that logs in to the portal can potentially access all of the meal plans, reports, and questionnaires that you want to share with the group.
- If all else fails, you can always send questionnaires as links, and download reports and meal plans as pdf documents without using the portal at all.