Your team

The three roles

Everyone on the account is an owner, an admin or a technician. The role decides which parts of WorkOrders each person can open.

• Owner. Can do everything, including billing and the company-wide security settings. The person who signs up becomes the owner, and you can't invite someone in as an owner.
• Admin. Can use the team page, reports and company settings, but not billing, and not the setting that decides whether the company requires two-factor. An admin can run the account day to day without access to the card on file.
• Technician. Works on jobs. Technicians don't see the team page, settings or reports. They see the board and the jobs on it.

Only owners and admins can see reports, because the export includes every customer's contact details and completion notes. That covers the whole Reports section: the saved reports and their spreadsheets, and the workload calendar, which shows every customer's jobs laid out by who did them. See reports and saved views and the workload week.

Customer records work the other way. Everyone can look up a customer, a firm or a site, because a technician at the door needs the phone number as much as the office does. Only an admin can change one, merge two together, or revoke a firm's portal access. See organisations, customers and sites.

There's a second way onto the account, and it's how most technicians join: an app code. You issue it to one person from the team page, and it gets them into the app without an invitation email. Each code works once and expires after three days. A code for someone new always makes them a technician, never an admin. See signing in on your phone for how to issue one, and the app on your phone for what they can do once they're in.

You can't invite an owner

Team → Invite only offers admin or technician. The owner is set up once, with the company, and only changes if ownership is formally transferred.

Inviting someone

Go to Team → Invite, enter their email address and pick a role. They'll get an email with a secure link to accept the invitation. When they open it, they set their own name and password. Nobody else at your firm sees or sets their password. If they don't accept, the invitation expires after 14 days.

A technician's invitation also tells them about the app, where to get it, and that the office will give them an eight-character code to sign in to it. That way, someone who gets both an email and a code knows what each one is for. The link is for the website and the code is for the app, and both get them into the same account.

You can revoke a pending invitation from the team page at any time before it's accepted. That frees up the seat it was holding (see below).

You can also resend it, which helps when the first email went to their spam folder. If the invitation hasn't expired, they get the same link again, so the original email still works if they find it later. If it has expired, resending sends a new link that's good for another 14 days, and the old one stops working. The page tells you which will happen before it sends. There's a limit on how many times an hour you can resend one invitation. If you reach it, give them a ring or double-check the email address.

Seats

Each plan has a maximum number of seats, and the price is fixed for the plan, whatever number of seats you use. A company on Crew pays the same with two people as with the full ten. Adding someone never makes your bill bigger. Either they fit on your plan or they don't.

A pending invitation takes up a seat, just like an active person. Otherwise a company at its limit could send out lots of invitations and go over the limit as they were accepted, and the people accepting would be the ones turned away.

Changing plan never deactivates anyone automatically. If a company on Crew with nine people moves down to Van, which has three seats, the account is marked as over its limit and everyone keeps working. An owner or admin can sort it out when it suits them.

When you're at the limit and try to invite or reactivate someone, WorkOrders tells you so and shows which plan would fit. You can either deactivate someone to free up their seat, or move up a plan. See billing and plans for how that works.

Deactivating and reactivating

Removing someone from the team deactivates them. Nothing is deleted. They can't sign in any more, but every job they worked on still shows their name, so the job history stays complete. You can't deactivate the last owner on an account, because someone always has to be able to manage the company.

Reactivating someone brings them straight back. It uses a seat, the same as inviting someone new. If you're at your limit, you'll need to free up a seat or move up a plan first.

Changing someone's role

You can change someone between technician and admin from the team page. Only an owner can make someone an admin, so an admin can't create more admins. The change happens straight away. A technician who becomes an admin can see the team page, reports and settings immediately, without signing in again. You can't make someone an owner here, or change an owner's role.

Somebody who works for more than one company

If you invite an email address that's already verified at another company on WorkOrders, that person gets a workspace switch in their sidebar once both accounts are confirmed. They can then move between the two companies without signing in again. See working for more than one company for how it looks from their side.

Two-factor and invited staff

If your company requires two-factor authentication, anyone it applies to has to set up an authenticator app before they can use the site. That includes new people, straight after they accept their invitation and set their password. See signing in securely for what the setting does and how to change it.