Managing users & seats
Adding, removing, and reassigning seats in your eTool organisation — the day-to-day headcount and licensing admin tasks.
Every eTool organisation subscription includes a set number of seats — the licensed slots that give someone access to the organisation. This article covers the day-to-day admin job of managing who holds them: inviting a new user, removing someone, and reassigning a seat when your team changes. It's all done from the Manage Users tab in the organisation dashboard, and it's restricted to the Organisation Admin.
For what a seat type actually lets someone do once they're in — editing a project versus just viewing it, for example — see User roles & permissions, not this article.
Jump to the following sections in this post:
- Seat types at a glance
- Adding a user
- Inactivating a user
- Reassigning a seat
- Requesting and releasing a Hotseat
- Related posts
Seat types at a glance
- Specialist — a standard seat, manually assigned to one person. If you want to give it to someone else, an admin has to free it first.
- Hotseat — an upgraded version of Specialist that adds dynamic, automatic seat sharing: rather than one fixed assignment, the software manages who's actively using the seat in real time, across everyone the admin has allocated a Hotseat to. There's no limit to how many people an admin can allocate a Hotseat to — the limit that matters is how many people can be actively using one at the same time, which is capped by how many Hotseats the organisation has purchased.
- Read-only — view and report access only, no edits. Hotseat subscriptions include unlimited Read-only (and unlimited Admin) users, regardless of how many Hotseats you've purchased.
Which seat type someone holds is about capacity, not project-level permissions. Regardless of seat type, an Organisation Admin still separately controls who can access which specific project, via the Collaborators tab at the Structure level — see User roles & permissions for that distinction.
Adding a user
From the organisation portal, open Manage Users in the left-side menu, then click + Invite New User on the right. Enter the person's email address and send the invitation.
The email doesn't need to belong to an existing eTool account yet — you can invite someone who hasn't registered at all. Once they create an account using that exact email address, the invitation is waiting for them in their eTool Inbox, and they also get an email notification. This is why getting the address exactly right matters: an invite sent to the wrong address doesn't bounce or error, it just sits unclaimed, waiting for an account that will never match it.
The invitee accepts or declines from their Inbox. Accepting adds "your organisation" to the toolbar across the top of their screen, alongside any other organisations they belong to.
Inactivating a user
To remove someone's access, inactivate them from Manage Users. This frees up whatever seat they were assigned, so it can go to someone else.
If they've genuinely left the organisation rather than just being paused, don't stop at inactivating them — their projects, custom templates, and custom EPDs need to be handled too, or the organisation loses access to them. See Staff turnover: handover procedure for that complete process, including moving their data to someone else afterwards.
Reassigning a seat
How this works depends on the seat type.
A Specialist seat is a fixed, one-to-one assignment, so reassigning it means removing it from the person who has it before giving it to someone else — there's no automatic sharing.
A Hotseat doesn't need this kind of manual reassignment for day-to-day access, since the software manages who's actively using it in real time (see below). Reassigning a Hotseat mainly comes up when you want to change who's eligible to draw from the pool at all — for example, removing someone who's left the organisation so the Hotseat allocation reflects the current team.
Requesting and releasing a Hotseat
Once an admin has allocated someone a Hotseat, that person requests actual access from the Session Access tab on their own profile — this is shown automatically on login. They can choose to leave "Request Seat Access" on or off:
- Off — they use eTool as a Read-only user for that session, without taking up a seat.
- On — the software assigns them a seat immediately if one's free. If none are free, it notifies everyone currently holding a seat, asking whether they want to keep it or release it. Anyone who doesn't respond within 5 minutes has their seat automatically released and handed to the new request.
This is entirely separate from project-level access: someone can hold a Hotseat and still see "no access" on a specific project if they haven't also requested seat access for that session, or if they haven't been added as a Collaborator on that project by an admin.