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Administration
Workspaces & Teams
Set up team spaces, invite collaborators, assign roles, and manage shared credits.
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Workspaces & Teams
A workspace is the context in which you work in Acervo. It owns your credits, your jobs, your batches, your institution profiles, and your processing history. Every action, uploading, processing, exporting, is performed inside one specific workspace.
Acervo supports two kinds of workspaces, and you can belong to both at the same time.
Personal vs. team workspaces
| Personal | Team | |
|---|---|---|
| Owner | You alone | The team (multiple members) |
| Credits | Your personal balance | Pooled team balance |
| Jobs and batches | Yours alone | Belong to the team |
| Institution profiles | Yours alone | Shared across the team |
| Billing | Your card | Team's billing account |
| History | Only you can see it | Visible to everyone with permission |
Use a personal workspace when you're evaluating Acervo, doing a one-off project, or processing material that doesn't belong to a team workflow.
Use a team workspace when your institution will use Acervo across multiple staff members. Setting up a team early, even with one member, means credit accounting, jobs, and history are shared from day one and there's no painful migration later.
Setting up a team
Creating a team
Anyone with an Acervo account can create a team. From the team settings page, click Create a team and give it a name (your institution, your department, your project). The user who creates the team becomes its first owner.
Note. Creating a team does not transfer your personal credits. Personal credits stay personal; team credits are tracked separately. New teams can also claim 25 free starter credits. The same one-time offer that personal accounts get, redeemed at $0 and valid for 30 days.
Inviting members
Owners and members with the right permission can invite others by email. From the team settings page, enter the invitee's email, pick a role (owner, admin, billing, or member), and send the invitation.
What happens next
- Acervo emails the invitee with a unique invitation link
- The link is good for 7 days and can only be redeemed once
- The accepting user must sign in (or sign up) with the same email address the invitation was sent to (verified by email)
- Pending invitations are visible on the team settings page and can be revoked or resent
Accepting an invitation
If you're new to Acervo, the invitation link will walk you through signing up. If you already have an account, signing in with the matching email completes the join. You'll land in your new team workspace and see the team in your workspace switcher.
Roles and permissions
Every team member has a role, a preset bundle of permissions, plus optional per-permission overrides for fine-grained control.
Default roles
| Permission | Owner | Admin | Billing | Member |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Invite members | ✓ | ✓ | · | · |
| Remove members | ✓ | ✓ | · | · |
| Manage roles | ✓ | · | · | · |
| Purchase credits | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | · |
| Manage billing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | · |
| View billing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | · |
| Process documents | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| View team usage | ✓ | ✓ | · | · |
| Manage institution profiles | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Export results | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Every team needs at least one owner. Acervo will block the only owner from leaving or being demoted unless another owner is in place first.
Working in a team
Switching workspaces
If you belong to a team in addition to your personal workspace, use the workspace switcher in your user avatar menu to choose where you're working. Every action you take is scoped to the active workspace.
The avatar menu also holds your interface language. Choose English, Español, or Français and the workbench speaks that language everywhere you sign in. You can also set it from the account page, next to the theme.
Shared credits
A team has its own credit balance, separate from any member's personal balance. When a team member processes documents in the team workspace, credits are deducted from the team's balance. When the team runs out, processing is paused until more credits are purchased. By anyone with Purchase credits permission.
Acervo uses atomic credit accounting. Concurrent jobs reserve credits at job start so two users can't accidentally overspend the same balance.
Team usage and history
Members with View team usage permission can see all jobs, batches, and credit transactions across the team. Useful for institution-wide reporting and accountability. Personal jobs stay personal; team jobs are visible to the team. They never mix.
Managing the team over time
- Changing roles · Owners and members with Manage roles can promote or demote any member, except the only remaining owner.
- Removing members · Removing a member revokes their access immediately. Their past jobs and contributions stay in the team's history (attributed to them). Only the membership is removed.
- Revoking invitations · Pending invitations can be revoked at any time before they're accepted, by anyone with Invite members permission.
- Admin overrides · Acervo's internal admin tools can intervene in unusual cases (transfer of ownership when no owners are available, etc.). Most teams will never need this.
Where to go next
- §3 Uploading Documents · Run your first job inside the team workspace
- §9 Credits & Billing · How team billing, bundles, and Stripe checkout work
- §5 Reviewing in the Workbench · Inspecting team-owned jobs before export