How To Track Agency Projects In Softr Using AI

Stop Managing Projects From Too Many Places With a Custom Agency Portal

You're juggling spreadsheets, emails, Slack messages, project management tools, and client calls just to keep projects moving forward. The real problem isn't just tracking tasks—it's keeping your internal team and clients aligned without exposing too much of your internal chaos. You need one system that gives your team full visibility while showing clients only what they need to see, eliminating endless status update emails and protecting your internal workflows from client confusion.

Why Most Agency Project Management Systems Create More Problems Than They Solve

The core challenge isn't just task tracking—it's maintaining alignment across two very different audiences. Your internal team needs to see everything: the messy details, internal notes, realistic timelines, and resource allocation. Your clients need a clean, professional view that keeps them informed without overwhelming them with minutiae they don't need to understand. When you try to use the same system for both, you either over-share internal details or under-communicate with clients, neither of which helps you deliver projects on time.

Building a Custom Portal Using Softr's AI Code Builder

Softr's AI Code Builder can now handle the heavy lifting of building a custom agency portal in minutes instead of hours or weeks. By starting with a detailed prompt—either written yourself or generated using ChatGPT or Claude—you can describe exactly what you want the application to do, and the AI will build the foundation. The AI will even ask clarifying questions about authentication methods, client access scoping, and feedback submission levels to ensure it gets the setup right from the beginning, making it much easier than trying to fix everything later.

Understanding the Data Layer That Powers Your Portal

Before testing your application, you need to understand the data structure the AI created in Softr's database. The users table contains everyone who can log into your app with their email, name, avatar, and critically, their role field—which determines whether someone experiences the portal as an admin, project manager, team member, or client. These users connect to other tables through linked relationships: clients connect to the clients table with account-level information, project managers link to their projects, and everyone connects to their assigned tasks and project updates. This interconnected data structure is what drives the personalized user experience for each person logging into your portal.

Setting Up User Groups and Permissions Correctly

User groups are the most critical element that dictates what each person sees when they log into your application. The AI builds initial user groups based on your prompt, but you must verify these are correct because they completely control the user experience—an admin sees everything while a client only sees their specific information. You set up these groups in the User Groups tab using condition-based rules, typically based on the role field in your users table. Getting this right from the start prevents major headaches later when you discover clients can see internal information they shouldn't access, or team members can't find what they need to do their jobs.

Customizing Page and Block-Level Visibility for Different User Types

Softr allows you to control visibility at both the page level and the block level within pages, giving you granular control over what different user types can access. Each page shows who has permission to view it through visibility settings—for example, a feedback submission page should only be visible to clients, while project detail pages might be visible to everyone but show different information depending on role. Within each page, individual blocks can have their own visibility rules, so you might show a welcome message to everyone but restrict active project statistics to only project managers and admins. You also need to set up conditional filters so that when clients log in, they only see projects assigned to them, preventing any cross-contamination of information between different client accounts.

Refining the AI's Work for a Production-Ready Application

While the AI Code Builder saves hours of development time, it doesn't create a production-ready application right out of the box. You need to review every page and form with a critical eye, looking for places where the AI made assumptions that don't match your vision. For example, in a feedback submission form, the AI might ask clients to manually enter the date and their name, when these fields should be automatically populated since the system already knows who's logged in and when they're submitting feedback. By converting these to hidden inputs with automatic values, you simplify the user experience while still collecting the necessary information. When you encounter issues the AI can't fix through prompts—like blocks not showing correctly for certain user types—it's often faster to manually adjust the visibility settings yourself rather than continuing to prompt the AI.

Conclusion

With Softr's AI Code Builder, you can now build a professional agency portal that gives your team complete project visibility while providing clients a clean, focused view of only their projects. You now understand how to leverage AI to create the foundation, customize user groups and permissions, and refine visibility settings to deliver exactly the right information to the right people. This system eliminates scattered communication and creates one source of truth that keeps projects moving forward on schedule.

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