Inviting your team

Accounts payable is not a one-person job, and a product that priced it as one would be quietly encouraging you to do it badly. This page covers adding people to a workspace, choosing a role, and the rules that govern who may approve an invoice once they are in.

Before you start

• You have to be an Admin. Everyone in the workspace can read the member list; only an Admin can invite, change a role or remove access, and only an Admin can see the pending invitations.
• Have the person's email address in front of you. The invitation can only be redeemed by somebody signed in as that address, so a typo means a new invitation rather than a fix.
• Decide their role before you open the dialog. It is one of four, and the choice is not cosmetic — see the table below.
• If you are inviting a Viewer, your workspace needs at least one building already. A Viewer is limited to the buildings you tick, and a workspace with no buildings has nothing to tick.

Nobody is charged per seat

Every plan carries unlimited users, including the free one. Approvers, property managers, your principal and your outside bookkeeper never appear on the bill.

This is a deliberate position rather than an introductory offer. Per-seat pricing makes organizations ration approvers, and rationing approvers is exactly how you end up with a shared login, a controller approving things they never saw, and an audit trail that names the wrong person. Charging for documents instead removes the incentive to cut corners on the control.

Add the people who genuinely make the decisions. The volume you process is what you pay for.

The four roles

There are four roles, and there is no facility for custom ones.

They are not a hierarchy with a dial on it. Each restricted action names the roles it accepts, and a role either appears in that list or does not. That is why custom roles are absent: a role no route has ever heard of would grant its holder nothing while looking, on screen, as though it granted something.

The first three are your staff; the fourth is not. Admin, Controller Approver and AP Specialist differ in what they may change, and otherwise see the same workspace: the same inbox, the same vendors, the same rules, the same audit trail. A Viewer sees none of that. It reads only the buildings an Admin assigned to it, it cannot code or edit an invoice, and it cannot read the audit trail at all. It is built for an outside owner, a condo board volunteer or a third-party approver — the person who has to sign for one building's spending and has no business reading the rest of your portfolio. Do not use it for staff: there is no way today to give somebody inside your company everything except the audit trail.

The full matrix of who may do what — connectors, mappings, mailboxes, tiers, billing, rules, exports — is in roles and permissions. It is worth reading once before you assign anything, because two of the sensible-sounding assignments are wrong: an outside bookkeeper rarely needs Admin, and a property manager who only approves does not need to code.

Reading the member list is open to everyone in the workspace. Changing it is restricted to Admins. Hiding the list from an AP specialist would buy no security — the same names are already on every approval in their queue — and would stop them finding out who to send an invoice to.

1. Choose the role

Work from what the person actually does, not from their title.

• They run the workspace, pay for it and connect the ledger — Admin.
• They own the chart of accounts, close the books and sign for anything — Controller Approver.
• They read, correct, code and route the invoices — AP Specialist.
• They are not in your company and they approve for one or two buildings — Viewer.

If two of those fit, pick the smaller one. Changing a role later is one dialog, and it is recorded.

2. Open the Team tab

Go to Settings → Team. The member list sits under a heading that reads People, with the Invite button in the same header. A Pending invitations card appears below it once there is one outstanding; it is hidden when there is nothing in it.

3. Fill in the invitation

Press Invite. The dialog asks for an email address and a role, and it tells you what the chosen role is for as you pick it.

If you choose Viewer, a list of your buildings appears with a checkbox each. Tick at least one. The dialog will not let you save without one, and neither will the server: an empty list everywhere else in that dialog means "every building", so an outside approver with no buildings would be an outside approver with all of them. That is the one refusal people meet here, and it is deliberate.

Press the button to send it. The invitation is emailed to the address you typed.

4. Check that it worked

Three places, in the order they are useful:

• The pending list on the same tab now holds the invitation, with who sent it and when it expires.
• If the email could not be delivered — a bounced or unsubscribed address — the dialog stays open and prints the one-time link instead, with a copy button. Send it to them yourself. That is not a failure state you need to report to us.
• Audit Log records an invitation_created entry naming you, the address and the role. When the person accepts, an invitation_accepted entry names them.

You are done when the person appears in the member list with the role you chose. Until they accept, they are an invitation and not a member.

What the invitation link can and cannot do

The address requirement is the part that matters. A link forwarded to a colleague, or found in a mailbox backup years later, still cannot be used by whoever holds it — they would have to be signed in as the person it names. An expired invitation drops off the pending list on its own; issue a new one rather than trying to revive it.

Inviting somebody who is already in the workspace is refused rather than duplicated. If they need different access, change their role instead.

The outside bookkeeper

Bringing in an external bookkeeper or a fractional controller is a normal case, not an edge one, and it costs nothing.

Invite them like anyone else, with the role that matches what they actually do. If they close your books and post to the ledger, Controller Approver fits. If they are coding invoices for you and somebody internal signs, AP Specialist fits. Reserve Admin for the people who should be able to change your billing and your ledger connection.

Viewer is the wrong role for a bookkeeper who works on your books, and the right one for an owner who only wants to approve their own building's spending: it cannot code, cannot edit, cannot export and cannot read the trail.

One limitation to know before you send it: an inletAP account can belong to one workspace at a time. If your bookkeeper already uses inletAP for another client, accepting your invitation is refused with "This account already belongs to another workspace" — they need a separate sign-in for your workspace. Multi-workspace accounts are not supported today.

When the engagement ends, remove them. Their access stops; the audit trail keeps every decision they made, with their name on it, because the trail is append-only and nothing in the product deletes from it.

Who can approve what

Approval authority is not a general grant that a role carries around. It attaches to a specific approval on a specific invoice.

• An approval addressed to you is yours to decide, whatever your role.
• An approval that names nobody can be claimed by a Controller Approver or an Admin. It is not an open door for the whole workspace, and a Viewer can never claim one — an outside approver may only decide a seat addressed to them by name.
• The same person cannot sign twice. A tier that requires two approvers requires two people, which is the only thing that makes the number worth stating.

Tiers themselves — the amount bands, the SLA in hours and the number of signatures each band needs — are set by an Admin and are covered in approval tiers. The rules engine and its approval tiers begin at the Starter plan.

Changing roles and removing people

Both are Admin actions, and both are recorded.

There is one refusal you may meet: the workspace will not let you demote or remove its last remaining Admin, whether you are doing it to somebody else or to yourself. A workspace with no Admin has no one who can connect a ledger, change a plan or invite anybody back, and it cannot repair itself from the inside. Promote a second Admin first, then make the change.

There is a second refusal, and it is the mirror image of the first: you cannot take the last building away from a Viewer. An empty building list means "every building" for the three internal roles, so removing an outside approver's last building would widen their access rather than narrow it. Tick another building, or change their role, and then make the change.

Two Admins is a good steady state for most organizations. One is a single point of failure attached to one person's holiday plans.

Where to go next

• Roles and permissions — the full matrix, action by action.
• Approval tiers — encode who signs for what, and how quickly.
• Audit trail — what is recorded about every person in the workspace.
• Plans and limits — what each plan includes, and what it does not.