Add, deactivate and remove users
Seats are a plan limit, and a departing colleague leaves work behind in four places. Both are easier handled deliberately than discovered.
Adding people is easy. Removing them is where workspaces get quietly broken, because a departing colleague leaves work behind in four separate places and only one of them is obvious.
Their open conversations and tasks do not redistribute themselves. Any workflow they own stops reporting its failures to anybody. And if they were the WhatsApp channel message user, automated messages lose their sender. Deactivate first and you will find all four the hard way.
Before you start
- Admin access — user management is admin-only.
- A free seat, if you are adding: 1 on Starter, 3 on Growth, 10 on Scale, 20 on Enterprise.
- For a departure: their open work reassigned first.
Steps
Check the seat meter before adding
Home shows seats used against the plan — "4 of 10, 6 left on this plan". Check before you promise somebody a login.
Invite by email and set the role at the same time
Default to agent. Promote deliberately rather than reactively — the request "can I have manager so I can see the whole queue" is exactly the request the role model exists to make you think about.
Set the role at invite time rather than fixing it later, because people notice a demotion far more than they notice never having been promoted.
Use the address they read
Assignment notifications, mentions and task reminders all go there. Somebody invited on an address they check monthly will look unresponsive rather than un-notified.
Before deactivating anybody, reassign their conversations
Managers and admins can reassign. Do it while the account is still active, because finding an inactive user's open conversations afterwards is considerably harder.
Reassign their tasks
Anyone can assign a task to anyone. Filter Tasks by assignee and move the lot.
Check what they own
Workflows have owners who are told when they fail — a workflow owned by a deactivated user is one whose failures go nowhere. Check the WhatsApp channel message user too.
Deactivate rather than delete
Deactivating keeps their history readable on activity feeds, so "Stage changed by Priya Nair" still makes sense next year. Deleting makes past records harder to interpret.
Confirm the seat is freed
Check Home again if you are deactivating in order to add somebody else.
Check it worked
After an offboarding, filter conversations, tasks and workflows by that person one more time. All three should return nothing. That is the check that catches what the first pass missed.
The parts people get wrong
- Always keep at least two admins. One admin is a single point of failure for billing, credentials and user management.
- Seats are counted per person rather than per concurrent session, so there is nothing to gain from sharing a login — and a great deal to lose, since assignment stops meaning anything.
The ones people actually ask
Can I restore a deleted user?
No, deleting a user is permanent. This is why we strongly recommend deactivating them instead, which preserves their history and activity.
Do deactivated users count towards my plan limit?
No, deactivated users do not consume a seat. Only active users are counted against your plan allowance.
Can multiple people share a single login?
They could, but it ruins accountability. Assignments, audit trails, and permissions become meaningless. Always use one seat per person.
What if a departed user was an admin?
Promote another user to admin before deactivating the departed admin to ensure you always have at least two active admins.
Will reassigned workflows notify the new owner?
Yes, once you reassign a workflow to a new user, they will start receiving the failure notifications for it.
Should I deactivate or delete somebody who has left?
Deactivate. It keeps their history readable on activity feeds, so Stage changed by Priya Nair still makes sense next year. Deleting makes past records harder to interpret and gains you nothing — a deactivated user does not consume a seat.
What do I need to do before deactivating somebody?
Four things, while the account is still active: reassign their open conversations, reassign their tasks, check whether they own any workflows, and check whether they are the WhatsApp channel message user. Each of those goes quiet otherwise, and finding an inactive user's work afterwards is considerably harder.
Somebody wants manager access so they can see the whole queue.
That is exactly the request the role model exists to make you think about. Manager is not a view — it is the ability to change how work arrives for everybody. If they genuinely need to see the queue to do their job, that is a case for it; if they are curious, it is not.