I Built a Client Portal in Zite with Stripe, PDFs & ChatGPT

Building a Client Onboarding Portal in Zite with Stripe Payments, PDF Generation, and ChatGPT Integration

You're tired of juggling fragmented workflows where onboarding forms live in one tool, project files in another, and payment information scattered everywhere. What if you could consolidate everything into one powerful application that handles client onboarding, processes payments, generates documents, and leverages AI—all without writing code? In this tutorial, you'll see exactly how to build a complete client onboarding portal in Zite using just prompts, then upgrade it with Stripe payments, automated PDF generation, and ChatGPT integration to create a truly impressive business application.

Starting with a Comprehensive Prompt to Build Your Foundation

The key to building a powerful Zite application starts with your initial prompt. Zite allows up to 15,000 characters in your prompt, so take advantage of this by including as much detail as possible about what you want to build. For this client onboarding portal, the prompt outlined the need for both internal team members and external clients to access the system, with different views and permissions for each role. By toggling on the "Plan First" feature before sending your prompt, Zite will create a detailed plan with sketch previews showing what your app will look like before it builds anything. This planning phase asks clarifying questions about how users should be distinguished, how clients get linked to records, and how consultant assignments should work, ensuring the foundation is solid before construction begins.

Understanding the Planning Phase and Sketch Previews

After answering Zite's clarifying questions, the platform generates a comprehensive plan that can span 15 pages or more, with about a thousand words per page. Each section of the plan represents a specific component of your app—from the welcome page and client dashboard to the internal team dashboard and onboarding form. The sketch preview feature shows you a visual representation of what each section will look like, making it much easier to visualize the final product. You can edit individual sections of the plan without affecting the overall structure, and you can even download the entire plan as a PDF to analyze with other AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT. This collaborative approach helps you refine your application before any actual building takes place.

Integrating Stripe Payments Directly into Your App

One of Zite's most powerful new features is the ability to integrate Stripe payments with just a prompt. After building the initial app, you can add a Stripe-powered payment step by simply telling Zite to create a payment page where clients can pay a specific amount—in this example, $2,500 for a project deposit. The prompt also specifies that after successful payment, the system should update the payment status to "paid" and reflect this on the client dashboard. The result is a fully functional payment button that, when clicked, displays Stripe's embedded payment form directly within your application. Clients never leave your app to complete the transaction, and all authentication and security are handled by Stripe, making it seamless to collect payments while maintaining a professional, unified experience.

Generating PDFs from Your Data with a Single Prompt

Creating PDFs from your application data is another feature that Zite makes remarkably simple. With a prompt asking Zite to generate an onboarding summary PDF from the information clients submit in their intake form, the platform creates a button on the internal client detail page that generates a formatted PDF on demand. The generated PDF includes all the information the client filled out, displays their payment status, and organizes everything professionally. These PDFs are automatically saved to a "Generated Documents" table in your database, creating a document URL that can be shared via email, surfaced to clients in their portal, or accessed by internal team members. This capability transforms how you can document and share client information without manual document creation.

Adding AI Enrichment at the Database Layer

Beyond the application interface, Zite allows you to add AI enrichment directly at the data layer. By sending a prompt to add AI summary fields to the onboarding submissions table, you can have AI automatically generate summaries of client submissions, recommend service fits based on their responses, and identify missing information. These AI agents work in real-time on the data in your database and can be configured to run automatically, use specific models, skip cells that already have information, or even toggle on web search for more powerful analysis. In this example, the AI agent analyzed an onboarding submission and provided a summary of the client's goals, noted their timeline and budget alignment, and flagged all missing information that prevented proper service recommendation—all without manual review.

Connecting ChatGPT to Query Your Database

Zite takes AI integration even further by allowing you to connect external AI tools like ChatGPT and Anthropic directly to your database. By setting up an integration with OpenAI in the data layer settings, you can query information about your database, run analyses through prompts in ChatGPT, and interact with your data outside of the Zite environment. You can use Zite's OpenAI connection or connect your own custom API key to have queries go through your own ChatGPT account. This capability means you can leverage the full power of conversational AI to understand what's happening in your system, generate insights, and make data-driven decisions about your business operations.

Conclusion

Building powerful business applications no longer requires extensive coding knowledge or months of development time. With Zite's new features—including intelligent planning, Stripe payment integration, PDF generation, AI enrichment, and ChatGPT connectivity—you can create sophisticated client onboarding portals that consolidate your fragmented workflows into one streamlined system. You now know how to build applications that process payments, produce documents, and leverage AI to work smarter, not harder.

If you found value in this content, give us a thumbs-up and subscribe for more insights. Visit our website for a wealth of resources and continue your journey in building smarter solutions.