When somebody leaves a management company, two things are supposed to happen.
Their name comes off the staff list.
Their key stops working.
Most software only really does the first one.
So we keep two separate records, on purpose.
An employee is a person in the business. They turn up one of two ways: the sync carries them across from the accounting system, or somebody adds them by hand. The record says which — so nobody has to work out why a name appeared overnight.
They carry email addresses and phone numbers, and they can be switched off without being erased. The manager who left in 2021 still signed that letter in 2020.
Bringing a whole team in at once: hand over the roster — a spreadsheet, a PDF, a photo of the page in the binder — and it reads the names, emails and numbers into rows you correct on screen before a single one is saved.
Nobody has ever gone home proud of typing in forty colleagues.A user is the other thing entirely. A user is a login.
You don't type one of those in either. You pick the employee, pick which of their email addresses it should go to, pick a role, read the summary, send.
Then the invitation gets a life of its own — pending, accepted, expired — sitting on that same screen with a resend button beside it, rather than buried in your sent items from March.
Then scoping. This person, these communities. A manager who looks after eight communities opens the app and sees eight.
Access is one question. Responsibility is another. Every community has a slot for the person who runs it, and six more beside it: assistant manager, accounts receivable, accounts payable, delinquencies, architectural, inspections. One name each. A community with nobody in the manager slot says so on its own card, in plain words: No manager. Where the accounting system already keeps that roster, it arrives filled in and stays that way. The communities you created yourself, you fill in here. Nobody should have to ask a group chat who covers Willow Creek.
A staff directory is a list of people. A user list is a list of keys.Two switches, because they answer two different questions. Deactivating an employee tidies the directory. Blocking a user shuts the door.
Treat them as one thing and somebody who left in June is still downloading in October.Coming up: what day one looks like for a community that has never been in the system at all.