How portfolios, accounts and users relate

How portfolios, accounts and users relate · Help

The way to understand why you cannot see or change something in the panel is to know which of three layers you are standing on: the user, the portfolio and the account. This article explains how the three connect, which information lives where, and the points that are most often confused.

The three layers

User — A person with a login. The e-mail address, password, interface language and theme belong to them. One user can sit in many portfolios.
Portfolio — The roof over accounts and the team. Roles, the access policy, assignment rules and keys live here. See Portfolio.
Account — A single Instagram or WhatsApp identity. Conversations, contacts, automations and reports live here. See Account.

The chain runs one way: user → portfolio → account. A user is never attached to an account directly; they join a portfolio, and that membership decides which accounts they reach.

Which information lives where

Layer	What it holds
User	Name, e-mail, password and security, interface language and theme, the account to open on sign-in, the plan (for the portfolios they own)
Portfolio	Team and roles, account access, the access and visibility policy, conversation assignment rules, AI keys, external service connections, audit logs
Account	The connected channel, conversations, contacts, tags, contact fields, automations, rules, sequences, media, saved replies, business hours, time zone and language, reports

When you cannot find a setting, look at this table first: more often than not it is being looked for on the wrong layer.

Membership: what ties a user to a portfolio

A user joins a portfolio by invitation. Two things are decided at that moment:

Role — What they can do. Owner, administrator, editor, agent or viewer. Each one is described in Roles.
Account access — Where they can do it. There are two options: All accounts or Selected accounts.

The two are independent. The role says what, the access says where.

⚠️ Note: the role is portfolio-wide. A person works with the same role in every account they can reach; there is no "administrator here, agent there" arrangement. If you need that distinction, put the accounts in separate portfolios.

How account access works

With All accounts, the member also reaches accounts connected to the portfolio later. With Selected accounts, they reach only the accounts you ticked; a newly connected account is not added to their list by itself.

Owners and administrators sit outside this choice: by virtue of their role they always reach every account. The team screen states this with the note Owners and administrators always reach all accounts.

An account a person cannot reach behaves as if it does not exist for them:

It does not appear in the account switcher, on the landing screen or in the My portfolios list.
Typing its address does not open it; they get exactly what a non-member gets (page not found). Whether the account exists is never revealed.
They cannot be an assignee in that account, no conversation can be assigned to them, and they receive no notifications from it.

Which layer holds the plan

The plan belongs to the user but is spent through the portfolio. The rule: a portfolio's account limit, team seats and features follow that portfolio's owner's plan.

What follows from this:

In a portfolio where you are only a member, you do not pay for the plan; that portfolio uses its owner's.
That is why the Portfolios you belong to list under My user settings › My portfolios shows only the portfolio name and your role; its usage does not count against you.
Your own plan limits apply only to the portfolios you own.

A concrete example

An agency has three people: Deniz (founder), Eren (team lead) and Sude (intern). The agency has two clients, and each client has one Instagram and one WhatsApp account.

The setup:

Deniz creates two portfolios, "Client A" and "Client B". She is the owner of both and the plan is hers.
Eren is invited to both portfolios as an Administrator. Because he is an administrator, no account access is chosen for him; he reaches all four accounts.
Sude is invited only to "Client A", as an Agent with Selected accounts access, and only the Instagram account is ticked.

The result: Sude does not even know "Client B" exists, and she cannot see "Client A"'s WhatsApp account either. If Deniz connects a new account to "Client A", Eren sees it immediately (all accounts) and Sude does not (selected accounts).

When an account moves to another portfolio

You can move an account into another portfolio you own. Moving is the job of whoever owns both portfolios, and all of the account's data travels with it: contacts, conversations, automations, media, saved replies, segments, general rules and sequences. Nothing is deleted.

What changes is who can reach it. After the move, the target portfolio's team reaches the account: the owner, the administrators and the members with "All accounts" access. The "Selected accounts" choices from the source portfolio are dropped.

That has two visible consequences:

Conversations assigned to people who will not reach the account in the target become unassigned; the open ones are redistributed by the target's assignment rules.
The selections of AI keys and external service connections made for that account are dropped. If the target has no connection with the same name, that account's external request steps are left without one.

The move screen lists the records to be moved and the people whose access will change, before you confirm.

Points that are often confused

"Where is the team?" The team is portfolio-level: Portfolio settings › Team. Account settings has no team section; old links redirect there.
"Why can't I see this account?" Either you are not on the portfolio's team, or your Selected accounts access does not include it. Both produce the same screen: the account behaves as if it were not there.
"I am an administrator but a section is missing." Owners and administrators sit outside the access policy, so the policy never takes a section away from them. If a section is missing, the reason is your plan or the account's channel type (Insights, for example, exists only on an Instagram account).
"I changed a setting and it did not apply to the other account." The setting you changed is on the account layer. Business hours, language, time zone, saved replies and messaging behaviour are configured per account.
"I cannot remove a member." Only the portfolio owner removes members. An administrator invites people and changes roles and access, but cannot remove anyone.

Limits

An account lives in one portfolio at a time.
A user has one role per portfolio.
A portfolio has one owner, and ownership is not transferred.
The number of team seats and the number of accounts per portfolio are limited by the portfolio owner's plan.

Once you can tell the three layers apart, "who sees what, and why" stops being guesswork.