Partner can't see their project in the portal

7 min read · Updated Jul 17, 2026

Almost every "the portal is broken" ticket comes down to the same thing: the partner is not an explicit member of that project. Current gives a partner access one project at a time — there is no "see everything for my company" shortcut, and there is no way to grant it by accident. So when a partner says the portal is empty, you're not debugging a bug, you're walking a short checklist.

How partner access actually works

A partner is an external, read-only user. They see a project only while a membership links them to that specific project. Remove it and their access disappears immediately. Everything they can read — the project header, phases, tasks, milestones, shared documents, the conversation — is filtered by that membership at the database layer, not hidden by the interface. That's why a signed-in partner with nothing shared sees a calm empty state rather than an error. Work the checks below in order, cheapest first.

What the partner reports	Most likely cause	Go to
"I never got an email"	Invitation still pending, or mail didn't land	Check 1
"I signed up and I'm in an empty Current"	They signed up with a different email address	Check 2
"No projects shared yet"	The project was never shared with them	Check 3
"It says my access is turned off"	The partner account is disabled	Check 4
"This project isn't available"	That project isn't shared with them (stale link)	Check 3
"I see the project but half of it is blank"	Working as designed — see Check 5	Check 5

Check 1 — Is the invitation still pending?

1
Open Partners
In the sidebar, under Manage, click Partners. The page has two panels: Partner directory (people who have accepted and signed in) and Pending partner invitations (people who haven't).
2
Look for their email in Pending partner invitations
If they're listed there, they never finished signing up. The row shows the projects the invite will share and the date the invite expires.
3
Check the expiry date
An invitation is valid for 14 days from the moment it was created. Past that date the join link stops working, and it will not attach them to your workspace even if they use it.
4
Re-invite, and hand them the link directly
Click Revoke on the stale row, then Invite partner, enter the same email, tick the projects, and Send invitation. Current emails a branded join link and also shows a copyable join link in the dialog — copy that and send it over Teams or your own email if the automated one is getting filtered.

Note

Only an admin can create the invitation

Project managers can open Partners and share or unshare projects, but creating a new partner invitation requires a tenant admin. If Send invitation returns a "Not authorized" message, that's why.

This is the sneakiest failure, because from the partner's side it looks like success. The join link only attaches them to your workspace if the email they sign up with matches the invited address (capitalization doesn't matter — anything else does). If Alex is invited as alex@northwinddental.com and signs up as a.mendez@northwinddental.com, Current never sees an invitation for that address, and what happens next depends on how they signed up.

＋If they signed up with email + password under the wrong address, Current creates a brand-new empty workspace and makes them its admin — tell-tale sign: a full staff-style app with no projects, not the calm partner portal. They'll swear they "created a Current account" — and they did, just not yours.
＋If they signed in with Microsoft under the wrong address, no workspace is created at all — they land on an access-pending screen.
＋Either way the fix is the same: have them sign out, revoke the old invite on Partners, re-invite the exact address they will actually use, and have them sign up from the join link with that address.
＋The invited address is shown on the Pending partner invitations row — compare it, character by character, with what they typed.

Check 3 — Is the project actually shared with them?

Accepting an invitation only grants the projects that were ticked on that invitation. Projects created afterwards are not shared automatically — someone has to share them.

1
Find them in the Partner directory
Manage → Partners. Each row shows the shared-project count, or the grey text "No projects shared yet". That text is your answer.
2
Click Manage access
The dialog lists every non-template project in your workspace with a checkbox (playbook/template projects can't be shared). Ticked = shared. Search the list if it's long.
3
Tick the project
Changes apply immediately — no save button. The partner sees the project on their next page load. Unticking cuts their access off just as fast.
4
Or share from the project itself
On the project page, managers get a Project access panel. Add person lets you add a partner to that one project. It's the same membership, reached from the other side.

Heads up

Never fix visibility by changing their role

Granting a partner an engineer, project manager, or admin role does make the project appear — along with rates, budgets, logged hours, internal notes, your staff roster, and every other project in the workspace. The read-only partner role is the only thing enforcing the financial firewall. Share the project instead. See "The partner financial firewall".

Check 4 — Is the partner account disabled?

A disabled partner can still sign in, but Current stops them before the portal loads and sends them to an access-blocked page. In the Partner directory their row is greyed out with a red "Disabled" pill. Re-enable them under Admin → Users & roles, where disable and enable live for every account.

Check 5 — They're in, but the project looks half-empty

If the project opens and shows status, progress, milestones and the work plan, but the documents or conversation sections are bare, nothing is broken. Those areas are deny-by-default: content reaches a partner only when someone on your team deliberately shares it.

Area of the portal	Shows up only when…
Shared documents	The document has been marked partner-visible. Documents added to a project are internal by default.
Conversation	A staff member posted the comment with "Visible to co-managing users" ticked. Partner replies are always co-managed.
Task descriptions	The task is flagged partner facing. The task name, status, dates and progress always show.
Milestones	The task is marked as a milestone.
Hours, rates, budgets, costs	Never. There is no setting that turns these on for a partner.
Staff names	Partners see the name of whoever posted a co-managed comment, and of teammates who are members of the project they share. They never see your full staff roster, and never a name attached to hours, rates or cost.

Tip

Where the weekly digest fits

The Weekly partner digest is a per-project opt-in on the project page (managers only). When it's on, every partner who is a member of that project gets a progress summary on Mondays; completed projects are skipped. Use Send me a preview on that panel to see exactly what your partner receives — the preview goes to your own inbox, never to them. The digest is not an access grant: a partner who isn't a member of the project simply isn't in the audience.

Still stuck?

＋Ask them to sign out and back in — access changes land on the next page load.
＋A join link is tied to one email address, so a colleague's forwarded link won't work for them.
＋If they can't get past the sign-in screen at all, that's an authentication problem, not a portal one — see "Can't sign in? Troubleshooting login and 2FA".

For the full picture of what a partner does and doesn't see once they're in, read "What partners can see — and what they never can". To set one up from scratch, see "Invite a partner to the client portal".

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