The Unobits platform
Members, contacts and portal users
Unobits holds three different kinds of people — your team, the people you do business with, and outsiders you give portal access — and keeps them apart on purpose.
On this page
Three different kinds of people exist in Unobits. Keeping them apart is deliberate: it decides who uses a seat, who can sign in to what, and whose details you are storing.
| Members | Contacts | Portal users | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who | Your team — the people who work in the workspace | The people and companies you do business with | Clients, partners and guests you let see part of your workspace |
| Where they live | Admin → People | CRM (and the modules that use CRM, such as Finance) | Portals |
| Sign in to | The Unobits app | Nothing — they are records | Their portal only |
| Use a seat | Yes | No | No |
| Access decided by | Role and permissions | Not applicable | Portal grants and share links |
Members#
Members are users of your organization. Each has a role (Owner, Admin, Manager or Member), optional extra permissions and optional group memberships. They count against your plan's seats. See Invite your team and Roles and permissions.
Contacts#
Contacts are the people your business deals with, held in CRM. Your workspace may call them something else — Clients, Guests, Patients, Buyers. They are records, not users: a contact cannot sign in.
Several modules use CRM contacts rather than keeping their own list of people:
- Finance bills CRM contacts. Finance stores only a customer's payment terms, currency and addresses; their name and email come from CRM.
- Reach leads are linked to the same person in CRM when one exists. A lead can also exist before anyone has added them to CRM.
- Projects and Calendar link to CRM records rather than retyping names.
Portal users#
When you give a client or partner access to a portal, they get a portal account (or a share link) that opens only that portal, only showing what you granted. Portal users are stored separately from CRM contacts even when they are the same person, so granting portal access never exposes your CRM, and editing a contact never changes someone's portal access. See Portals.
Where the same human appears twice#
It is normal for one person to be several of these at once — a freelancer might be a member in your workspace and a contact in your CRM; a client is a contact and a portal user. Unobits does not merge them, because each role carries different rights. Link them where it helps (for example, a portal client to their project) rather than expecting one record to do all three jobs.