Create your Meta Business Portfolio

A Meta Business Portfolio is the container that everything else lives inside. Your WhatsApp Business Account is created inside it. Your phone number lives inside that. Exabloom connects to the number. Take the portfolio away and the chain has no anchor — there is, literally, nothing to connect to.

This is why the portfolio is step one for every customer, whether you are connecting an existing number through Coexistence or standing up a fresh one on the API. It is free, and creating it takes about two minutes.

Almost everyone believes business verification is a gate you must clear before you can use WhatsApp. It is not. An unverified portfolio can connect a number and message real customers on day one. Verification raises limits — it does not grant access.

The second road is the one nobody mentions. Meta will lift you from 250 to 2,000 customers a day if you verify or if you simply deliver 2,000 messages to unique numbers over a rolling 30-day window with good quality. Paperwork is one option, not the option.

You need a personal Facebook account to log in with. That account is the identity the portfolio is created under — it is not shown to your customers, but it will be visible to anyone you later add to the portfolio.

• Go to business.facebook.com and log in with your Facebook profile.
• Click the drop-down menu below Home in the top left.
• Click Create a business portfolio.
• Fill in three fields: your portfolio name, your first name and surname, and a business email address. Meta uses the email to contact you; customers never see it.
• Click Create (Meta also labels this Create portfolio in places), then confirm the email address from the message Meta sends you.

Nothing is created alongside the portfolio. It starts empty — your Facebook Page, Instagram account, ad account, and WhatsApp Business Account are all added afterwards. One constraint worth knowing early: an asset can only belong to one portfolio, so decide which portfolio owns what before you start attaching things.

Here is the idea that dissolves almost every verification nightmare. Verification is not one test. It is two independent tests, and they prove different things.

The document leg asks is this business real. The connection leg asks are you the one entitled to speak for it. A document can never answer the second question, and a confirmation code can never answer the first.

Meta states the rule plainly, and it is worth committing to memory because you may need to quote it back to someone:

Read the second half slowly. Address or phone number. The legal name is required; the second leg is satisfied by either one. An ACRA Business Profile carries your legal name and your registered address, which means it satisfies both halves on its own — the absence of a phone number on it is not a gap.

Meta accepts five document types: a certificate or articles of incorporation, a business registration or licence document, a government-issued business tax document (self-filed tax documents are rejected), a business bank statement, and a utility bill. An ACRA Business Profile is a business registration document — the second category — which is why it works.

• Documents must be unexpired and issued by the relevant authority.
• Cover up extraneous personal data before uploading — Meta names identity numbers specifically.
• English is one of Meta’s 21 supported languages, so Singapore documents need no translation.
• Meta publishes no rule on document age, file format, or file size. Guides claiming “no older than 3 months” or “PDF only, 10MB” are inventing it.

Once your details are in, Meta asks how it should confirm you represent the business. In its own words, you “choose a method (email, phone, text message, WhatsApp message or domain verification) to confirm your connection”. Five options — and domain verification is one of them, not a separate track you complete elsewhere.

The three phone-shaped methods all demand the same thing: a phone that Meta can reach and tie to the business. If your number is a director’s personal mobile — the normal state of affairs for a small Singapore company — these are the hard road.

Which makes domain verification the quiet winner for most businesses. It proves the connection with something you control outright — your website — and Meta itself points phone-less businesses to it. You do it at Settings → Brand safety → Domains, using a meta-tag, an uploaded HTML file, or a DNS TXT record. Enter the root domain only: website.com, not www.website.com. Once verified, you can remove the tag or record and the status holds.

The most common dead-end sounds like this: Meta — sometimes a support rep directly — insists on an official document showing the legal business name and the business phone number together. The ACRA profile has no phone. The telco bill is in a director’s personal name. Utilities are not under the company. There is no such document, and the business stalls for weeks.

That demand does not match Meta’s published rule. The strongest evidence is Meta’s own help centre, which devotes a section to this exact situation — the heading is verbatim:

Meta then routes those businesses to domain verification. A documented, supported path for a business with no phone number cannot coexist with a mandatory phone-bearing document. If you need to push back on a rep, this is the page to put in front of them.

• Do not submit the director’s telco bill. It fails on Meta’s own terms — the legal business name must appear on a utility bill for it to count, and a personal-name bill invites a mismatch rejection.
• Domain verification does not remove the document leg. It substitutes for the connection leg only. You will still upload entity documents — that is expected, not a failure.
• Submit first, argue later. Meta’s on-screen instructions contradict its own help centre in places. Rather than trying to satisfy the wording, submit a clean ACRA-based application and let Meta accept or reject it — a rejection at least comes with a stated reason you can act on.
• Check your website before resubmitting. A site that fails to load, is not HTTPS-compliant, or contains a broken link is an explicitly listed rejection reason — and an easy one to miss when you are focused on documents.

• Editing verified details forces re-verification. Change the legal name, country, phone number, website, or tax ID after verifying and you start the process again. You can add a missing phone or website without re-verifying.
• The Edit button may be locked for WhatsApp portfolios. Meta warns you “may not be able to click Edit if the business portfolio is used for a WhatsApp Business account” — which is precisely our customers. Get the details right the first time.
• 14 working days is the real SLA. Not the “1–5 business days” third-party guides promise. Plan onboarding around the longer number and be pleasantly surprised.
• The request may never appear in Security centre. Meta says you “may be emailed or notified from a platform other than Security centre”. Reviewer requests often surface only in the Support Inbox — a common cause of silent multi-week stalls. Check it.
• Exact match on legal details. Meta asks that entered details “exactly match the details of your legal business entity”. Copy them off the ACRA profile rather than typing from memory.
• Appeals are conditional. Meta says you “may be eligible to appeal” a rejection — no published criteria, and no documented cap on self-serve attempts. The widely-quoted “3 attempts” limit is real but applies to partner-led verification, not to you.
• Verification is not the blue badge. Business verification proves your entity to Meta and raises limits. It is a separate thing from a verified badge or an Official Business Account, and it does not grant one.