Will somebody train my staff to use the portal, or do we have to work it out on our own?

Yes, you get help getting started, and no, you are not left to work it out on your own.

When a portal goes live there is a handover session with your team, run online and screen shared, where we walk through the parts your staff will use every day. That usually means making a booking on behalf of a customer who has phoned in, finding an existing booking, issuing and cancelling, setting up staff logins, and pulling the reports you need at the end of the month. Most agencies find their counter staff are comfortable after one session, because the booking screens follow the same order they already work in.

How much training is included does depend on your plan, so it is worth asking before you assume. A single handover and written guidance is normally part of any setup, while repeated sessions for a larger team, training for new joiners months later, or a session built around your own way of working may be arranged separately. If you take the API rather than a portal, the handover is with whoever builds your website instead, because your own screens are the ones your staff will see.

Before your go live date, please send the team a list of who needs to be trained and what each person does, so the session covers the work they actually handle rather than everything at once.