Guest Access & User Groups

What is guest access?

Guest access in FormAssembly lets someone who already has their own FormAssembly account work in your account for a limited time, under one of your account's roles, without joining your team as a member. A guest keeps their own identity and their own account, counts toward no seat, and never appears on your Members list — their access ends on the date it was granted until, or the moment you revoke it.

Guest access exists for consultants, agency partners, and FormAssembly Support: people who need real access to build or review work inside your account, but who should not become permanent members of your team.

Two things are true of every guest grant:

• Both sides consent. You invite the guest; the guest accepts the invitation before any access begins.
• Access is time-bound and revocable. Access lasts 1, 7, 14, 30, or 60 days, and you can revoke it at any point before it ends.

Guest access is available on org accounts. A personal account cannot invite guests.

For admins: inviting and managing guests

Who can invite a guest?

Anyone whose role carries the team-invite permission — typically an account admin — can invite guests, view the guest roster, and revoke access. The same permission is required to open the Guests tab.

You can only grant a role that is no more powerful than your own. In the invite form, a role you are not permitted to assign is disabled and shows the reason.

How do I invite a guest?

1. Open Team from the account settings rail. The page is titled Team Management.
2. Select the Guests tab.
3. Under Invite a guest, enter the person's address in Guest's email.
4. Choose a Role. The list holds every role in the account, including Viewer and any custom role your account has defined. The default is Builder when you are allowed to assign it; otherwise the first role you can assign is selected.
5. Choose how long access lasts under Access lasts — 1, 7 (default), 14, 30, or 60 days.
6. Click Send invitation.

FormAssembly emails the guest an invitation naming you, your account, the role, and the date access would end, with a link to accept.

Beside the role, FormAssembly states what the role will let the guest see: a role that confers admin sees and manages everything in the account, while any other role sees only what the guest builds and what is shared with them. Read that line before sending — it is the clearest summary of what you are handing over.

Rules that apply when you invite

• The email must belong to an existing, active FormAssembly user who is a member of some account. Guests are existing users, not new signups — use a member invitation for someone who has no account yet.
• You cannot invite someone who is already a member of your account.
• Access can be at most 60 days out. A longer request is refused rather than shortened.
• Only one pending invitation can exist per person per account at a time.
• If you are yourself working in the account as a guest, any guest you invite cannot outlast your own access.

A refused invitation shows the reason inline, directly in the form.

The Guests roster

The Guests tab holds two lists, and the tab's count is the number of live grants.

Guests lists live access — invitations not yet answered, plus active guests. Each row shows the guest's name and email, their home account, the role, the status (Invited or Active), who invited them (marked as a guest when the inviter was themselves a guest), and when access ends. Each row has a revoke (trash) button, labelled for screen readers as "Revoke guest access for {name}".

Past guests lists access that has ended, with the status (Revoked, Declined, or Expired) and the date access actually stopped. Ended grants are retained for the audit trail, so you can always see who had access and when.

How do I revoke guest access?

Click the revoke (trash) button on the guest's row in the Guests list on the Guests tab. Revocation takes effect immediately: the guest's next action resolves back to their own account, with no waiting period and no need for them to sign out and in.

You can revoke an invitation that has not been accepted yet, and you can revoke active access.

Extending access

Access dates cannot be edited. To extend a guest's access, invite them again with a new duration — fresh consent is required on both sides. You can send the new invitation before the current access lapses, so there is no gap.

What happens when guest access ends?

When a guest's access to your account ends — by revocation, by expiry, or because the guest left — FormAssembly handles their work exactly as it handles a departing member's:

• Workflows and themes the guest owned in your account are reassigned to a recipient: the person who invited them, if that person is still an active member, otherwise the account's longest-standing admin.
• Connections the guest created in your account are deleted, because an authorization belongs to the person who granted it. Any step bound to one will show as missing a connection until a member reconnects under their own authorization. Connection services the guest defined are left in place.

Timing differs by how access ended. When access is revoked, or when the guest leaves, reassignment happens immediately. When access expires, there is a 48-hour grace period: access stops at the expiry moment, but the guest's work is left in place for 48 hours, so a new grant accepted within that window picks up where the old one left off. During the grace period the guest's workflows keep running on their connections, and admins keep full access to everything throughout.

A guest who never accepted an invitation leaves nothing behind, so nothing is reassigned.

For guests: working in someone else's account

How do I accept a guest invitation?

1. Sign in to your own FormAssembly account.
2. Open Invitations from your account settings rail, under the Personal group beside Profile and Security. Waiting invitations also appear at the top of your account menu, which carries a count while any is waiting; if more than three are waiting, click View all N invitations to open the full page.
3. Click the invitation to open its page. The page names the account, the role and what it will let you see, who invited you, and the date access would end.
4. Click Accept, or Decline if you do not want the access.

Accepting switches you straight into the account and lands you on the Workflows page, with the guest banner at the top. You can also reach an invitation from the link in the email, but you do not need the email — invitations are always listed in the app.

You can answer an invitation only while it is still waiting and unexpired. You can answer invitations from any account you are working in; unlike your own settings, answering an invitation changes nothing that belongs to you.

How do I switch between accounts?

Once you hold at least one active guest grant, a Switch account group appears at the top of your account menu in the sidebar (and at the top of the More sheet on mobile). It lists your own account first as Your account, then each account you are a guest in, labelled Guest · <role>. The account you are currently in is marked.

Choose an account to switch into it. FormAssembly reloads and lands you on the Workflows page, which every account has. Switching applies to your whole session, so switching in one tab switches every tab and client you are signed in on.

The guest banner

While you are working in an account as a guest, a banner sits at the top of the content column. The guest banner names the account, carries a Guest badge, states your role and the date your access ends, and offers two actions:

• Back to <home account> switches you back to your own account.
• Leave <account> ends your own access to that account.

The banner cannot be dismissed, because it is the one thing that tells you which account your actions are affecting.

What can I do as a guest?

Exactly what your granted role allows, in that one account — no more and no less. If your role carries team permissions, you administer that account's members as a member with the same role would. If your role carries the compliance review permission, you act as a Reviewer there alongside members.

A few things stay with your own account:

• Your profile, security, and authorized apps settings are yours, not an account's, so a change applies in every account you work in. While acting as a guest, those pages show a notice in place of their forms, with Back to <home account> to switch home and open the same page there. Change your password, your name, or your multi-factor settings from your own account.
• Onboarding and the onboarding checklist belong to your own account and do not appear while you are acting as a guest.
• Leaving your own account is done from your own account. If you try to remove yourself while acting as a guest, FormAssembly asks you to switch back home first.

If a password change is overdue on your account, you can switch home but not into a guest account until you have changed it — the password change happens at home.

How do I leave an account I'm a guest in?

Click Leave <account> on the guest banner and confirm. FormAssembly states the consequences first: access ends immediately, you need a new invitation to come back, your workflows and themes in that account are handed to the recipient, and your connections there are deleted. After confirming, you land back in your own account.

A pending invitation to the same account is left alone, so you can decline it separately if you do not want to return.

User groups

A user group is a named set of users in one account, managed on the Groups tab of the Team page. Groups exist so that "the Admissions team can edit these workflows" is one sharing record plus a membership list, rather than one record per person that drifts as people join and leave.

A group confers no roles or permissions of its own. What someone may do is still decided by their own role; a group decides only which workflows they reach. Sharing a workflow with a group gives everyone in the group access at the level you chose, and adding someone to a group gives them every workflow shared with that group.

How do I create a group?

1. Open Team from the account settings rail and select the Groups tab.
2. Under Create a group, enter a Group name (1–64 characters, unique within the account).
3. Optionally add a Description (optional), up to 256 characters.
4. Click Create group.

The Groups list shows the account's groups with their member counts; expand a group to see its members. Creating, renaming, deleting groups, and adding or removing members require the group-management permission; deleting a group asks for confirmation.

Adding and removing members

Members are added from the people who have standing in the account — active members, and guests with current access. Add or remove a member from the group's row on the Groups tab.

• Membership takes effect immediately, on the member's next action. Nothing is cached.
• A user can belong to any number of groups. When several groups, or a group and a direct share, reach the same workflow, the most permissive access level applies.
• Groups are flat. A member is always a person, never another group.
• Removing someone from the account removes them from its groups. Deleting a group removes the group from every workflow it was shared with, but never touches the workflows themselves. Deleting a group also ends any guest access that other FormAssembly accounts granted to that group, so the group's members lose that access on their next action; it does not revoke guests in your own account.
• A guest's group memberships are kept if their access lapses, and confer nothing while they have no current access; a new grant restores them.

Who can see a group?

Group names and descriptions are visible to everyone acting in the account, because the Collaborators dialog on a workflow offers every group of the account to anyone who can share. A group's member list and member count are visible only to people whose role carries team-view or group-management permission — being in a group does not by itself let you see who else is in it.

FormAssembly Support access

When someone in your account allows FormAssembly Support into the account from a support request, that access appears on the Guests tab as a single row for the Support group, together with the support case number it was granted for, the role, who granted it, and when access ends. Each Support staffer who has taken up the access is listed beneath the row by name and email, with the date they did so.

The row's status is Active while the access is live; it is never Invited, because the Support group as a whole was consented to rather than one named person. The revoke (trash) button on the row ends the access for the group and for everyone who took it up, in one action — the same as revoking any other guest.

Your account sees the Support group's name and the staffers who actually used the access. It never sees FormAssembly's internal member list, and it never manages that group.

See also: Getting Help, for how Support access is requested and granted in the first place.

Tips & Troubleshooting

• "No such user" or a refused invitation. Guest access requires an existing FormAssembly user who is a member of some account. If the person has no FormAssembly account yet, invite them as a team member instead, or ask them to sign up first. The invite form shows the exact reason inline.
• A role is greyed out in the invite form. You cannot grant a role carrying permissions you do not hold yourself. The disabled role states why. Ask an admin with the broader role to send the invitation.
• 60 days is the maximum. A longer duration is refused, not shortened. For longer engagements, re-invite the guest when access lapses — you can send the new invitation before the current one ends so access is continuous.
• The guest can't see your invitation. Waiting invitations are always listed under Invitations in the guest's account settings and at the top of their account menu, so a lost email is never a blocker. Confirm you invited the address attached to their FormAssembly user.
• A guest says they can't change their password or profile while in your account. That is expected. A guest's profile, security, and authorized apps settings apply in every account they work in, so they are changed only from their own account. The pages show Back to <home account> for exactly that.
• A workflow fails after a guest leaves. The guest's connections in your account are deleted when their access ends, because an authorization cannot be transferred. A member needs to reconnect the affected connect step under their own authorization. Workflows and themes themselves are reassigned, not deleted.
• Guest access expired by accident. You have 48 hours. Invite the guest again and have them accept within the grace period, and their work in your account stays with them. After that window, their workflows and themes move to the recipient.
• A guest can't demote or remove your last admin. The last-admin protection counts members only, and guests are never on the Members list, so a guest admin cannot remove the account's final member admin — and cannot be removed as a member either. Revoke their grant instead.
• Sharing with a group isn't giving someone access. Check two things: that the person is actually in the group on the Groups tab, and that the workflow lists the group as a collaborator. A group confers no permissions by itself, so also confirm the person's own role allows the action they are attempting.
• Deleted a group by mistake. Deleting a group removes it from every workflow it was shared with, and it ends any guest access that other accounts granted to that group — so the group's members lose access to those accounts. It does not revoke guests in your own account; to end a guest's access to your account, use the revoke (trash) button on the Guests tab. Recreating the group with the same name does not restore the shares or the guest access — re-share the workflows, re-add the members, and ask the other account for a new invitation.