space.vars.productName portals — licensing, PINs, and single sign-on.
## What grants access
For someone to sign in to a portal, two things must be true on their NetSuite record:
1. **Portal Access is ticked.**
2. **A role is assigned** on the same record.
Without both, they either can't sign in at all or land on an empty portal with no pages.
## Which record types can have access
| User type | Where the record lives in NetSuite | Typical portal use |
| ------------- | ---------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Employees** | Lists > Employees > Employees | POS, internal ordering, dashboards, reports |
| **Customers** | Lists > Relationships > Customers | Self-service ordering, order history, account management |
| **Vendors** | Lists > Relationships > Vendors | Vendor portal, purchase order management |
| **Partners** | Lists > Relationships > Partners | Partner portal, shared catalogs |
| **Contacts** | Lists > Relationships > Contacts | People linked to a customer or vendor company |
All of these use the same two fields described above.
{% hint style="info" %}
The record type has to match the portal type. A Partner record gets a partner portal; if that person needs to create transactions, they need an employee record instead. See [Employee Center Licenses](/netsuite-admin-guide/overview-3/employee-center-licenses.md).
{% endhint %}
## Granting access one user at a time
The Users page, the Give User Access dialog and the Modify Role dialog are the same screens the Client Admin uses. They're documented once, in the Client Admin guide:
| Managing Users | The users table — find, filter and edit who has access. | User Management |
| Give User Access | Grant a NetSuite entity access and assign a role. | Give User Access |
| Roles & Permissions | Create roles, and change which role a user holds. | Roles & Permissions |
| Employee Center Licenses | Give staff POS access without a full NetSuite licence. | Employee Center Licenses |
| Managing PIN Codes | PINs for manager overrides and authorization. | Managing PIN Codes |
| SSO Setup | Connect your identity provider to NetSuite. | SSO Setup |