In Civic Review, no account is needed in order to submit applications online. After an application is submitted, a unique portal is created. This portal allows applicants to view the status of their application, make payments, and reply to messages sent by your staff.

Each application is assigned a reference # and PIN. This is used to login to the portal for that application at https://app.civicreview.com/lookup. In the staff dashboard, you can see the reference # and PIN under "Permit Overview". There's also a nice little icon that links to the applicant's portal, if you want to see what they see.

The reference # is a bit unruly in size, and that's because this number is not just unique across all applications in your account - it's unique across all Civic Review applications.

The good thing is that generally applicants don't need to visit https://app.civicreview.com/lookup and type these big numbers. Instead, whenever anything is needed for them to do, or any notifications are sent, the applicant gets an email with a magic link that logs them in to their portal without needing to type it in. Here's a sample email:

Sometimes and applicant might say "I can't find my email with the link, can you tell me how to get into my portal?". You have a few options:

If you send them a message, say "Here's a link to login to your portal," they'll get an email like this:

And that will save them the hassle of having to type that Reference # in.