The vendor portal, or "Job Report Dashboard," is a bit of a hot mess, and I'm not a fan of propping up badly designed vendor emails with an even more poorly designed web portal. That being said, if the vendor portal had some basic configurations it might be more useful.
For one: status updates. I'm not keen on giving my vendors the opportunity to cancel orders placed by my customers, even accidentally. We should be able to choose what status updates are available to vendors, including custom status, or being being able to remove the status option altogether.
For two: I can see where recording a shipment might be useful if we're outsourcing print, but what if we're outsourcing design? Or maybe we're just using the vendor to order materials, or maybe they're shipping the job to us first. So the option to remove this would also be crucial for some vendor scenarios.
Basically vendor relationships can be complex, so having a one-size-fits-all solution means it's going to be a bad fit most of the time.
Personally I think better email customization would eliminate the need for this portal altogether, but it could be more useful with some basic configuration options. Even a custom css/js field would be a big help.
Thanks for posting this. If looking at this eventually, this would certainly be an added benefit to us as well.