Overview
Before you send a supplier their first portal link, you can use the Email me a test link button to receive the exact same email and portal experience the supplier would get — without involving a real supplier or affecting any tokens already issued to one.
This is especially useful because the most common setup problems (a stopped background job, an unconfigured mail sender, an unresolvable portal address) fail silently: Luminous marks the order as invited but the supplier never receives anything. Sending a test link to yourself is the only way to confirm the full chain is working before going live.
Prerequisites
- The Supplier Portal must be enabled for your account. (If it isn't turned on yet, the test link button will not appear.)
- Your Luminous user account must have an email address on file.
- Your account's portal address must be configured under Settings → Purchase Orders. If it isn't set, you will see an error when you click the button.
Steps
- Open any Purchase Order that has a supplier assigned to it.
- Locate the Email to supplier row on the order detail page.
- Click Email me a test link.
- The button shows Sending… while the request is in progress.
- Check the inbox of the email address tied to your Luminous account. You will receive the same email a supplier would get, sent from the same sender address Luminous uses for real supplier links.
- Click the link in the email to open the portal. You will see the order exactly as the supplier would — you can review lines, submit an acceptance or propose changes, request extra costs, and so on.
Important: The link is fully live, not a sandbox. Anything you submit through it — an acceptance, a proposed change to quantity or price, a cost request — is recorded on the purchase order as the supplier's response. This is intentional: testing with a real token proves the feature end-to-end.
How it works
- Luminous mints a fresh token specifically for the test. It does not use or "burn" any token that was already sent to a supplier contact, so testing cannot lock your supplier out of the order.
- The test link expires after 72 hours, the same as any other portal link.
- The email you receive is the identical mailable a supplier gets — same subject line, same sender, same portal URL format — so you see exactly what they see.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Likely cause |
|---|---|
| The Email me a test link button is not visible | The Supplier Portal is not enabled. Contact your admin to turn it on under Settings → Purchase Orders. |
| Clicking the button returns an error about a missing portal address | No portal address has been configured. An admin must set it under Settings → Purchase Orders before links can be sent. |
| Clicking the button returns an error about no email address | Your Luminous user account does not have an email address saved. Update your profile and try again. |
| The email never arrives | Your mail sending or queue worker may not be configured correctly — this is exactly the kind of silent failure the test link is designed to surface. Contact Luminous support. |