Your Portal's Labels: Say Job, Claim or Request

Your logo can be on the page and the portal can still sound like software. Nobody in a plumbing business calls a job a record, and nobody at an insurer calls a claim one either.

Labels are your portal's own vocabulary. What your records are called is set per table; everything around them, from the sign-in screen to the filter panel to the login code email, is set once for the whole portal.

What it does

Each table has a Labels tab, and the portal has one of its own. The setting that does most of the work is the record name, singular and plural.

Set the singular to "job" and roughly twenty strings follow it:

• The create and edit dialog titles
• The delete prompt and its confirm button
• Five toast messages and four empty states, including the ones on related tabs
• The screen-reader names on the row buttons

A handful of others are set separately when you want them: the create button, the form submit captions, the Details tab, the heading shown when a record has no name, and the view-mode toggles on calendar and kanban.

Why it matters

Wording is the part of an interface people read without noticing, which is exactly why the wrong wording is felt. "Delete this record" asks someone to translate; "Delete this claim" does not.

For a portal you hand to customers, that translation is a small tax on every screen, paid by the person you were trying to make things easier for.

Two behaviors to know

Labels are per role, like every other table setting, but a label set on the default role is inherited by any role that has not set its own. So the normal case is setting them once and having every role use them. The portal-level tab is simpler: one set of words for the whole portal.

Run your portal in another language

Because each of the portal's own strings has a box, labels cover the case where every word needs to change. The portal-level tab holds the sign-in screen, navigation, filters, record actions and the state messages in eight sections; each table's tab holds its record words; and the Emails tab holds the login code email's lines, with a live preview. Field and page names come from your Airtable base, so renaming them there completes the translation. The translation walkthrough covers the order to do it in.

What it does not change

Labels change the portal's own words only. Nothing is written back to Airtable, field labels still come from your Airtable field names, and the page name in the sidebar still comes from the Airtable table name. "Powered by CollabPortals" stays as it is, and a few messages that come back from the Airtable connection itself are not covered yet.

How it works

Open the table's Labels tab, set the singular and plural, and check the portal. The labels guide lists every string the record name drives and every box you can set separately.

Who it is for

Portals with a domain vocabulary, which is most of them once you look: maintenance portals with jobs, insurance portals with claims, internal request portals with requests, and animal shelters with animals.