Companies, users, and roles — how they fit together

When to read this article

You're either inviting your first teammate and trying to pick the right role, or wondering why a colleague can do something you can't (or vice versa). This article walks through the three-level structure (user → company → role), the five team roles, and where the Tax Advisor invite fits — which is sideways to the team-role system, not part of it.

If you're inviting an external accountant or Steuerberater, you want invite your tax advisor, not a team-member role. Tax advisors don't consume seats and have a tighter scope.

The model in one paragraph

A user is a single person with one email + password (or Google / Apple sign-in). A user can belong to one or many companies — each company has its own documents, transactions, billing, and audit trail. Within a company, every user has exactly one role that controls what they can see and do. Switching companies (in the company switcher at the top of the app) changes the lens; the same user can be Owner in one company and Member in another.

This is multi-tenancy with per-tenant role. Mentally: one address book of users, many separate businesses each with its own crew, where the same person can wear different hats in different businesses.

The 5 team roles, side by side

And the separate Tax Advisor invite (see invite your tax advisor) — bounded, fully audited access for external accountants: they review and approve invoices, flag things back to you with a reason, correct categories and VAT rates, reconcile bank transactions, and export — but they can never touch billing or team management, and they can't delete anything. It is not a team role you assign to your own crew, and advisors never use up a seat.

Why these five roles, in plain English

• Owner is whoever signed up + owns the subscription. There is at least one, and the last Owner can never be removed or downgraded. Only an Owner can promote someone else to Owner — do that before an Owner leaves. The Owner is the billing contact.
• Admin is for trusted co-leads who do everything except billing. Think co-founder, head of operations, the second-most-senior person in the company. Admins can invite and remove other team members, change their roles (but not promote to Owner), and act on every document — billing stays Owner-only. Useful when you don't want your team seeing your invoice from us.
• Bookkeeper is the person who actually does the books. The heaviest day-to-day user. Full edit on invoices and transactions, can run exports. Cannot manage team or billing. This is the right role for a part-time bookkeeper you've hired or for the team member who has taken on the books.
• Member is the rest of the team who forwards receipts and uploads expense documents but doesn't do the books. They can upload and view, but not edit the financial records. Right role for sales people, engineers, anyone who occasionally has an expense to record.
• Viewer is the audit / investor / silent co-owner who watches but doesn't act. Read access, no edit anywhere. Right role for someone internal who shouldn't be able to change things.

How role assignment works in practice

Inviting a new team member: Settings → Members → Invite. You enter the email and pick the role. They get an email with an accept link (valid 7 days); the invitee doesn't need an existing account. The role you pick at invite time is editable later — no migration needed. Note that a pending invitation already occupies a seat on your plan.

Changing someone's role: same page — pick a new role for them. Effective immediately. Safety rules apply: the last Owner can't be downgraded, and only Owners can promote to Owner.

Removing a team member: same page, Remove. Their access ends immediately, their seat frees up on your plan, their audit-trail entries stay (we don't rewrite history — what they did is still attributed to them). Documents they uploaded stay in the company; only their access ends.

Per-tenant means per-company

Each company is its own tenant. Concretely:

• Document quota is per-company (so two companies each on the Free plan get 10 documents/month each, with separate counters).
• Team-member count counts per-company (the Free plan's 1-user limit is one user per company, not one user across all your companies).
• The audit trail is per-company.
• Billing is per-company too — each company has its own plan and its own subscription invoice.

This matters most when you're running multiple small businesses through one account — each gets its own clean separation, including its own bill.

Edge cases

I want to change my own role. Role changes are made by Owners and Admins from Settings → Members, with two hard rules: only an Owner can promote to Owner, and the last Owner can't be downgraded or removed. To downgrade yourself, have another Owner or Admin do it.

There's no Owner anymore. Shouldn't happen — the system blocks removing or downgrading the last Owner. But if you've somehow ended up Owner-less (e.g. the Owner deleted their user account before promoting someone), write to [email protected] from a team email. We verify ownership via the original signup email + billing record and reassign the Owner role.

Custom matching rules — who can set them up? There's no self-serve rule builder in the app today — rules are configured per company on request via support, and vendor learning covers most cases automatically. See matching rules.

I'm the Owner of two companies and want to combine them. Not self-service. Both companies stay separate, each with its own plan and data. If you genuinely need a data-merge (one shared document pool, shared history), write to [email protected] — a manual migration may be possible, but it can't be reversed.

My team-member upload count seems off. Document quota is consumed per company, not per user. Every member's uploads count toward the same company counter — see Settings → Billing for the company-wide usage this month.

Two team members were editing the same invoice simultaneously. Last-save-wins for free-form fields; the audit log shows both edits. We don't currently surface a "another user is editing this" warning. For high-coordination teams, the convention "one bookkeeper per company" is the cleanest workflow.

Can a tax advisor also be a team member? Yes, on different companies. A user with a tax-advisor invite to Company A and a Bookkeeper role on Company B sees both, with the appropriate scope on each. The two roles are independent.

What does the Tax Advisor have access to that a Viewer doesn't? Tax Advisors work in their own portal and have bounded review powers: approve or flag invoices, comment, correct categories and VAT rates, reconcile transactions, add missing entries, and export — every action audited and visible in your activity feed. Viewers can't write at all. They're scoped for different purposes — Viewer is internal observation, Tax Advisor is external review.

Related

• Sign up and add your company — Owner role created at signup
• Invite your tax advisor — the separate external-access flow
• The onboarding wizard explained — what the wizard asks
• Creating a custom matching rule — role-gated to Bookkeeper+