Submitting and Extracting Data from Portal / External Sites

We have a ethical reason to get and post data to client portals (e.g. this isnt hacking sites!)

In short, we have a laravel application, which is truely awesome :)

However sadly in the industry its used in, the clients for our customers are somewhat behind the times. They post new jobs up on their portals and then it becomes a manual process to copy the information from said portal into the awesome app.

The same happens when the job is complete, the feedback (text) and associated media (typically images) have to be - once again - manually chucked on.

Add in the fact they have over 30 client portals, with associated users names and passwords to consider, it all becomes a labour intensive nightmare.

Now, obviously them having a API is the way to go, but that isnt going to happen before I die, so in the meantime - does anyone have any tips on this.

Obviously there is CURL - how does that manage sessions for logins? Can you create a virtual terminal of sorts and have fields filled out and pass back info to the app?

Any thoughts, suggestions or anything like that would be really gratefully received.

Thanks