Partners Portal

partners.matters.ai is the Matters.AI partner program portal — where channel partners (Cloud, VAR, Distributor, MSSP) register deals, request market-development funds, pull enablement content, and manage their company profile, and where the internal Matters.AI team reviews everything. It lives at apps/partners in the monorepo (@matters/partners) as a Next.js 16 App Router app with its own Clerk application, its own Neon Postgres database, R2 bucket, Upstash rate-limiter, and Vercel deployment.

This section documents the portal end to end — architecture, data model, the account-type RBAC, the access-request approval saga, the audit log, Salesforce/CSV partner-status resolution, every feature surface, multi-account login, and operations.

What it does#

• Onboards partners — known partners auto-activate on first login (their email domain matches a seeded Salesforce account); unknown ones submit an access request that a Super Admin approves, which provisions their Clerk organization + invite.
• Deal registration — partners register opportunities; the portal tracks a status lifecycle and (in live mode) syncs to Salesforce. See Opportunities.
• MDF — partners request market-development funds against their tier's quarterly limit; internal staff approve/reject/claim. See MDF Funds.
• Enablement — a tier-gated content library, partner agreements, the tier-benefits matrix, company profiles, team management, and a public partner directory. See Enablement.
• Governance — a 7-type account RBAC, an append-only audit log of every consequential action, and a Super-Admin-only assignment + access-review surface.

Account types at a glance#

Every user resolves to exactly one of seven account types. External (non-@matters.ai) emails are limited to the first four; internal tiers require an @matters.ai email. Full detail — capability matrix, source-of-truth, gates — is in Account-Type RBAC.

Surfaces#

Which gate guards each surface is documented in Authentication & Gates.

Data & integration modes#

The portal is backed by Neon Postgres 18 via Drizzle ORM (see Data Model). Partner status comes from one of two sources (Salesforce & CSV Mode):

• Live Salesforce — a JWT-bearer SOQL query maps a Contact + Account to a portal partnerStatus.
• CSV mode (the v1 default) — when Salesforce isn't configured, status is resolved by matching the user's email domain against the seeded partner_accounts table (~the SF export, loaded via pnpm seed:csv).

Tech stack#

• Framework — Next.js 16 (App Router, RSC + server actions), React 19
• Auth — Clerk (organizations + invitations + webhooks); the internal Matters.AI org + SUPER_ADMIN_EMAILS allowlist bootstrap Super Admin
• DB — Neon Postgres 18 + Drizzle ORM (neon-serverless pool, casing: "snake_case")
• Storage — Cloudflare R2 (content, agreements, MDF attachments, logos)
• Rate limiting — Upstash Redis
• Email — Resend (invites, approval/rejection, deal/MDF status)
• Errors — Sentry
• Theme — pm-* CSS custom-property tokens; unified AppShell + collapsible sidebar

Where to go next#

• Architecture — route groups, middleware, the gate layer, the shell
• Account-Type RBAC — the 7-type model, capability matrix, source-of-truth + Clerk mirror, ACID writer
• Access Requests & Approval — the all-or-nothing approval saga
• Audit Log — activity_log + recordActivity
• Operations & Runbook — env, schema, seeding, bootstrap, incident procedures