Custom member portal and membership management software
A member portal is judged on one number: how many members log in without being asked to. Most buying-group extranets plateau at a few dozen visits a year, because they were designed as a document showcase when members were looking for a service desk.
60+
member companies using the portal we delivered
Two weeks
the length of one batch: a portal opens use by use, never all at once
Source code
handed over and documented, with reversibility written into the contract
A custom member portal is not expensive because it looks good: it is expensive because it carries business objects that exist in no component catalogue. A forecast rebate, a tiered scale, a reconciliation between declared and invoiced revenue. Those are precisely what decides whether members come back.
Why buying-group portals stay empty
The story is almost always the same. The portal launches with the governance documents, the member directory, the list of approved suppliers and a news feed. Three months later, traffic falls back to the head-office team. Members did not reject the tool: there was nothing they could do there that email did not do faster.
- The portal publishes information instead of carrying a transaction.
- What it holds already exists elsewhere: in the newsletter, in the general manager's inbox, in a spreadsheet emailed every quarter.
- The figures on screen are older than the ones the member already has.
- Getting in needs a password last used eleven months ago.
- Nothing a member is actually obliged to do goes through it.
That last point is decisive and it is almost never addressed during scoping. A portal survives if it carries at least one process a member cannot avoid. Everything else — directory, news, governance documents — is content that benefits from traffic, never content that creates it.
What members actually come to do
Declare
Revenue declarations by supplier and by period. This is the obligatory process par excellence: no declaration, no rebate paid.
Find a price condition
The applicable scale, with this supplier, on this family, this quarter. It is the question head office is asked most, and the one that costs most time on the phone.
Download an agreement
The framework agreement in force, its pricing annex, the latest amendment. Members want the version that holds today, not the one emailed to them in April.
Track their rebates
The in-year forecast and the detail of the final statement: base used, scale applied, amount per supplier. A member who can see the calculation disputes it less.
Maintain their sites
Delivery addresses, outlets, secondary registration numbers, contacts by role. This data ages fast and nobody at head office can maintain it on the member's behalf.
Respond to a request
Sign up to a commercial campaign, commit to a volume, acknowledge a new condition. Short, dated actions that leave a trace you can rely on.
Adoption is designed, not decreed
Once that foundation is in place, the order in which functions are added matters more than people expect. Each addition extends the gesture the member already makes: they come to declare, so their forecast rebate appears on the same page; they check that rebate, so the scale behind it opens; they open the scale, so the agreement carrying it is one click away. Every function leans on the previous one, never sits beside it in a new menu.
Pick the load-bearing process
One process, obligatory, with a deadline. It sets the login frequency, and therefore everything else in the design.
Ship only what surrounds it
Authentication, company scope, history of that process. No directory, no news feed, no dashboard in the first batch.
Measure, then extend
Login rate per company, share of declarations filed online, volume of queries reaching head office. Those three numbers say where the next function goes.
Close the parallel channels
As long as email is still accepted for the same process, the portal stays optional. The switch is decided, announced and dated.
Membership management software manages companies, not users
A member is not an account. It is a company, with a head office, often several sites, and two to five people who each need part of the information — not the same part. The permissions model is the subject most reliably left to the end of a project, when it in fact determines the data structure from day one.
| Situation | What it forces on the permissions model |
|---|---|
| An owner and their accountant in one company | Two separate accounts on the same company, with different views: one sees rebate amounts, the other files the declarations. |
| A member with several sites | A scope per site and a consolidation at head-office level. Declarations are filed at one level or the other, never both. |
| A group owning several member companies | Cross-entity read access, without merging the member entities or their rebates. |
| An external accountant | A time-limited delegation, restricted to one scope, revocable by the member without going through head office. |
| An approved supplier | A separate area: their agreements, their terms, their invoicing returns. Never another supplier's data. |
| A change of managing director | A traced account handover, closing the outgoing access. Frequent, and almost never designed for. |
Custom build or off-the-shelf extranet
A packaged extranet handles a document library, accounts, distribution groups and a form. If your need stops there, it will cost less and we will say so. A custom build earns its price the moment the portal has to display a calculation you authored.
- Package: documents, accounts, generic forms, quick to launch, customisation limited to screens and colours.
- Custom: the group's own objects — member, site, agreement, condition, declaration, rebate — genuinely exist in the data model, with their rules.
- A package's cost reappears as subscription and workarounds; a custom build concentrates its cost in construction, then tapers.
- A package treats your scale as an attachment. That is exactly the starting point the project exists to remove.
Who builds these portals
MEKANO is a Lyon-based development studio specialising in management software for buying groups and member networks: supplier approval, revenue declarations, year-end rebate calculation, contract document management, member portals. We deliver at a fixed price, in two-week batches, on a Go, React and PostgreSQL stack, and the source code is handed over with its documentation. The Lyon buying group we delivered this platform for brings together more than 60 member companies and around fifty approved suppliers: its members declare, check their rebates and find their agreements in one place.
Frequently asked questions
- How long before a portal is genuinely used?
- Login rates follow the first obligatory deadline, not the launch date. On a portal whose first batch carries revenue declarations, most companies log in during the first campaign because there is no other route. A portal launched without an obligatory process never climbs: nothing forces the first login, and without a first login there is no habit.
- One account per person, or per company?
- One account per person, attached to one or more companies. A shared account looks easier to administer and gets expensive at the first serious question: who approved this declaration, who accepted this condition, whose access must be closed when an employee leaves. Company attachment also handles the real cases — an owner across two member entities, an accountant across five.
- Can the portal connect to our existing tools?
- Yes, and it usually should. We commonly connect accounting for rebate exports, the contact directory, and whatever system already holds part of the membership register. The rule we apply: every piece of data has one owner. The portal does not duplicate what lives elsewhere, it reads it — otherwise you end up with two truths and one more manual reconciliation.
- What does a first portal cost?
- Scoping and the prototype — authentication, company scope, the first working process on a sample of members — take three weeks and sit between €6,000 and €10,000 excluding VAT. The production version depends on the process chosen and the number of permission cases to cover. We quote a fixed price after scoping, once the scope is written down, not before.
- What about members who refuse to use the portal?
- Provide a controlled exit rather than a permanent parallel channel. In practice: head office can file on a member's behalf, but the entry is flagged as such and the volume of those entries is tracked. It measures the distance still to cover rather than hiding a silent exception. Groups that leave email open without measuring it keep two processes running for years.
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