Workspace and account
An account is a person: one identity, signed in with Google. A workspace is a business: the isolation root that every record belongs to. You reach a workspace through your account, and the records you see there belong to the workspace, not to you. That is why a colleague leaving takes nothing with them, and why nothing you do in one workspace is visible in another.
Which one owns what#
| Belongs to your account | Belongs to the workspace |
|---|---|
| Your identity and how you sign in | Every record: people, companies, deals, cases, conversations, calls |
| Your profile | Mailboxes, numbers and the channels they carry |
| Your sessions | The plan, the allowances and the usage against them |
| Which workspaces you can reach | Memory, Knowledge, standing instructions and rules |
| Your own preferences | Files, their versions, and the audit trail of who changed what |
Read down the right-hand column and the design becomes obvious: everything a business would still need if a particular person stopped working there is held by the business. The left-hand column is short on purpose.
How the two meet#
Signing in establishes who you are. Resolving the workspace establishes where you are working, and it happens before a single row is read — which is what makes isolation enforceable rather than aspirational. Every query that follows is scoped by that resolution, underneath row-level security in the database that would refuse a stray query even if the application asked one.
- You sign in with Google. There is no password sign-in; it is deliberately off rather than unfinished.
- Your identity binds to the workspaces you belong to, which is how one account can work in more than one business without their data ever meeting.
- The session carries the workspace, and a new sign-in can replace an older session rather than quietly running two.
- Permissions apply inside a workspace. What you may do is a fact about you *there*, not a property of your account.
The consequences people actually hit#
- Somebody leaves the business
- Their access ends; the records stay. Conversations, follow-ups and the history of what they did remain with the workspace, which is where the customers are.
- You work in two workspaces
- One account, two contexts. Nothing crosses — not memory, not Knowledge, not records — and the Assistant in one knows nothing of the other.
- You want a personal copy of something
- Export it deliberately, as a file. Nothing follows an account automatically, and an export neutralises formulas on its way out.
- Your plan runs out
- That is a workspace fact, not an account fact. It changes allowances for everybody working there rather than for the person who noticed.
- You sign in somewhere else
- The session moves; the workspace does not. What you can see is unchanged, which is the point of resolving it server-side.
Where the distinction gets blurred, and why not to blur it#
Two habits cause most of the confusion. The first is thinking of a workspace as *your* account because you are the only person in it — true today, and it makes the second person's arrival unnecessarily surprising. The second is treating an inbox connected to the workspace as personal mail; it is a channel the business operates, with a role, a signature and its own autonomy.
- **Ask *whose is this?* before *where is this?*** Most questions about visibility answer themselves once you know which of the two owns the thing.
- A permission problem is a workspace problem. Signing out and back in changes nothing about what you are allowed to do there.
- A billing question is a workspace question, even when it arrives in one person's inbox.
- A sign-in problem is an account problem, and it looks the same in every workspace you belong to.
The operator and customer split is a different axis again — that is about which routes a session may call, not about who owns a record. Operator and customer, as a design idea covers it.
Questions#
Can two people share one account?
They should not, and the design assumes they do not. Approvals, edits and sends are recorded against a person, so a shared account makes the audit trail say something untrue about who decided what. Adding somebody to the workspace costs nothing in clarity and gives every later question an honest answer.
If I delete my account, does the business data go?
The records belong to the workspace, so removing a person removes their access rather than the business's history. This is the same reason a departing colleague's conversations remain readable: the customer relationship was never theirs to take.
Why is there no password sign-in?
It is deliberately off rather than unbuilt. Google sign-in means there is no password stored here to be leaked, guessed or reused from somewhere else, and the account's own protections — whatever the organisation has enabled on it — apply to Connect without anything being duplicated.