A build partner is someone working alongside the builder on a job without being the builder or the homeowner: an interior designer, an architect, a buyer's agent. The portal is the builder's project seen from your seat, and how much of it you get is their decision, made per project.
Start with this: your access is not an account setting. It is attached to each project you are on, so the same login can give you a great deal on one job and very little on another.
Your projects
If you are on one project you land in it. If you are on several, the switcher at the top of the sidebar moves between them, and everything below it follows.
If you see No projects yet, nothing is broken. The builder has an account for you but has not put you on a job.
The sidebar is your access
Every module you hold is in the sidebar. Every module you do not hold is simply absent: no grayed-out row, no padlock, no "ask for access" button.
This helps when you are on the phone with the builder. "It is not in my sidebar" is a precise statement, and one they can act on.
Within a module, what you can do also varies. Some you can only read. On others you can act: reply to a thread, drive a task, add a selection option. The portal does not label which you have; the buttons are simply there or not.
The modules are Schedule, Tasks, Photos, Documents, Plans, Proposals, Messages and Selections.
What is shared, item by item
Holding a module does not hand you everything in it. For tasks, photos, documents and plans, the builder shares individual items with partners, so a Documents module can be genuinely empty on a project with hundreds of files.
Some builders also switch on an option for a particular partner that widens this to everything the homeowner sees. If your Documents suddenly holds much more than it did, that is usually what happened rather than a bulk upload.
Two things behave differently, deliberately:
Schedule has no per-item sharing. Hold the module and you have the project schedule. Whether dates are shown at all follows the builder's setting for the homeowner, so if you are seeing sequence without dates, that is a decision they made about the job rather than something aimed at you.
Messages never widen. The everything-the-homeowner-sees option does not reach conversation, because it would hand you every client thread including the financial ones. What reaches you is a thread you were included on, or a comment the builder flagged for partners on a record you can already see.
Selections
Selections is the one module where a partner can be more than a reader, and it is built around designers.
You see selections the homeowner cannot, including drafts, which carry Draft — not shared with client so you always know which conversation you are in. The row status is your own view of progress: Not Ready while there are no options, Pending once there are, Selected once the homeowner has chosen, plus Draft and Closed.
Prices on the option cards are the client-facing price and nothing else. Cost, markup and allowance never reach this portal, so a price you see here is the price the homeowner sees.
Adding an option
With authoring access, Add option puts an option on the selection. What you add is a proposal to the builder, not an offer to the homeowner. Nobody outside the builder's team sees it until they have priced it and released it.
The card tells you where yours has got to:
- Your option: you added it.
- Not priced yet and Awaiting the builder's pricing: with the builder. Edit and Remove are still yours at this stage.
- Not released to the client yet: priced, and the builder has not opened it to the homeowner.
- In Spec: included rather than priced separately.
Once the builder has priced it, released it, or the homeowner has chosen it, your Edit and Remove go away. You did not lose a permission; the option is no longer only yours to change. Ask the builder.
Where you have no button at all, the card says why: The builder decides this selection.
Proposals
Proposals are readable and nothing more. You can open the proposal the homeowner is reading, which is exactly what an agent needs, but signing and declining belong to the homeowner. Those actions do not exist in this portal; they are not merely disabled.
The status you see is written from your side: where a homeowner reads Pending Review, you read With Client, because it is not waiting on you.
What is not here, and will not be
There are no invoices, no payments, no bills, no change orders and no budget anywhere in the partner portal, at any level of access. This is not a module the builder forgot to switch on. Money is out of scope for a build partner by design, and there is no setting that brings it in.
Your details
Profile is always available, whatever else is. Keep your contact details current there, because that is where notifications go.
If something you expect is missing, the builder controls all of it, and the answer is a conversation with them rather than a setting on your side.