Accounts, Workspaces, Users, & Subaccounts
Accounts
A MessageBird account is what's tied to your login information. You can configure your first and last name, preferred language and time zone, as well as set up Two-Factor Authentication.
Workspaces
A Workspace is what really allows you to make the best out of what MessageBird offers. That's where you can control your finances, purchase numbers, send messages, control voice calls usage, manage your contacts and more. You can also monitor your insights, regarding anything tied to your Workspace.
A Workspace is a space created for you automatically once you sign up for a MessageBird account. As a main point of contact, you can then invite other people to your company (via email) to become users in the Workspace.
Users
Users are all the people that have access to the Workspace. Only one user is the owner of the Workspace, and only the owner can:
Add, edit, and delete other users.
Delete the Workspace itself
As a Workspace owner, you can invite other people to your company (via email) to become users in your Workspace. The people you invite will have to create a MessageBird account and each user will have their own login details. They will be added as administrators, and will have the same rights as you—the owner—except they cannot:
Add, edit, and delete other users.
Remove the Workspace itself.
Subaccounts
⚠️ Please note that Subaccounts will be sunsetted in the near future. All Workspaces that do not have any Subaccounts connected to their Workspace cannot add any Subaccounts. Workspaces that have at least one Subaccount connected can continue to add, edit and delete Subaccounts as always. Any user of a Workspace—be it the Owner or one of the Users (administrators)— can add Subaccounts via an email invitation.
Subaccounts have no financial control. When you create a Subaccount you can decide to:
Share the balance of the Workspace with the Subaccount.
Assign some set value of balance to the account (budget).
Following the invitation, the person will have to register at MessageBird and will have its own login details. The Subaccount will be somehow similar to a bright new, empty Workspace, with some restrictions.
While Workspaces are shared, that is, different users have access to the same Workspace, Subaccounts are dedicated to one email address only.
Example #1 - Simple setup
Let’s say you signed up for MessageBird. Since you created an account independently (not from an email invitation), a Workspace will automatically be created for you of which you are the owner.
In this use case, you might not need to give different permissions or access to people. Maybe you’re the only one using the Workspace or, you want other colleagues to have the same operational rights as you. In this case, it is better to add those people as users so they can view the exact same information and use the same products and balance inside MessageBird as you do, logging in with their own email.
Sam (sam@acme.com) works at Acme Inc and signs up to MessageBird. Sam would be the owner of the Workspace.
Afterwards, Sam invites his colleagues Agnes, Robyn, Bea, and Sol as users. Each of them will have their own login details.
Sam will be the only one who can.
Add, edit, and delete other users.
Remove the Workspace itself.
Example #2 - Multiple use case setup
Let’s say you signed up for MessageBird. Since you created an account independently (not from an email invitation), a Workspace will automatically be created for you of which you are the owner.
You want the Workspace to be used by different departments across your company: sales, support, and marketing. Since each department is unique, it's better to create one Workspace for each of them.
Sam is the initial MessageBird account holder is also the owner.
Sam decides to create separate Workspaces to handle sales, support and marketing and added different users to each one of them, based on the department they’re from - so all communication and operations in each can be more organised and separate, without bothering colleagues with the content that it’s not from their area.
Example #3 - Setup with different access control
Let’s say you signed up for MessageBird. Since you created an account independently (not from an email invitation), a Workspace will automatically be created for you of which you are the owner.
In case you want to be able to control how the money of a Workspace is spent and by whom, as well as to make sure you limit the capabilities of people (so they can’t purchase unnecessary numbers or accidentally send too many messages), the best is to create Subaccounts for each one of them.
Sam is the initial MessageBird account holder is also the owner.
Sam talks with Agnes who leads the Support team and they decide to create 3 Subaccounts to their Acme Support Workspace, one for each country. This can enable them to easily manage the traffic in different languages, Sam (or Agnes) can also assign country-specific numbers to their Subaccounts, and enough balance to keep them going. They can also easily track their progress through a separate Statistics section, where they see traffic and cost per Subaccount.
Subaccounts are dedicated to one email address only, in this example, all the people on the team from USA will each work from one email address.
Having subaccounts is also useful when you have a few different clients who are using the MessageBird platform and you want them to manage their own workflows, but you want financial control.
Last updated
