A client portal fed live from the field-service system

The brief

The agency was rebuilding the company's website and needed a specialist for the integration. Customers, mostly property agents, should be able to log in and see a private dashboard of their properties with past, current and future appointments, all coming from AroFlo.

The hard part: an API that did not behave as documented

AroFlo's API uses signed requests, and authentication from PHP failed even though the request looked correct. The documentation did not cover it, and support replies arrived by email days apart. We traced the failure to the timestamp used in the signature: once it was generated exactly as in AroFlo's own example, the signatures matched and every request worked.

Other gaps needed working around rather than waiting for: tasks could not be fetched by location, so we fetched by client and filtered in our own code, and paging did not limit result sets, so large accounts load through AJAX instead of in one heavy page.

What we delivered

• A plugin that shows each logged-in customer their properties and appointments, live from AroFlo.
• An admin screen to link each WordPress user to the right AroFlo client.
• Archived properties filtered out after the company found ones no longer managed by an agent still appearing.
• A permission fix so only administrators can change which AroFlo client a user is linked to, not the customer themselves.

Results

• Customers can check their own appointments without phoning the office.
• No double entry: the portal reads from the system the team already uses.
• The agency delivered a feature it could not build in-house, under its own name.

Client name and site withheld at our discretion. Details are taken from the project record.