Data ownership and single source of truth
Understand which records Portals owns and which records remain in their source modules.
Portals is a presentation and access control plane. It owns the external workspace, not the underlying business records.
| Information | Source of truth |
|---|---|
| Contact and company | CRM and shared business-party identity |
| Project, phase, task, milestone | Projects |
| Quotation and order form | Sales |
| Invoice and payment | Finance |
| Contract | Contracts |
| Subscription | Subscriptions |
| Ticket and knowledge content | Support and Knowledge Base |
| Meeting and availability | Calendar and Scheduling |
| Work order | Field Service |
| File contents and provider permissions | Original external provider |
| Portal composition and publication | Portals |
| Portal membership and portal role | Portals plus shared portal identity |
| Portal-owned external approval | Portals |
| Client-visible portal update | Portals |
Why this matters
- A quotation corrected in Sales is corrected everywhere it is shown.
- An invoice payment recorded in Finance does not require a portal update.
- A CRM contact is not duplicated because the person was invited.
- Provider access remains enforceable in Drive, OneDrive, or SharePoint.
- Disabling Portals does not delete source business records.
portals_entity_links contains typed IDs and presentation rules, not snapshots.
The external module area resolves current data from the owning module.
Specialized portals
Some modules also provide a purpose-specific external experience, such as Support ticket submission, contract signing, subscription self-service, or field-service estimates. Those remain source-module features. The Portals sellable module provides the composed workspace that brings the appropriate areas together for one stakeholder relationship.