# 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.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/compare/workspace-vs-account/

## 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.

1. **You sign in with Google.** There is no password sign-in; it is deliberately off rather than unfinished.
2. **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.
3. **The session carries the workspace**, and a new sign-in can replace an older session rather than quietly running two.
4. **Permissions apply inside a workspace.** What you may do is a fact about you *there*, not a property of your account.

> **Note** A record that somehow carried no workspace stamp would not be shared — it would be invisible. Isolation here is not a filter applied to results; it is the condition on which rows are visible at all.

## 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](/docs/troubleshooting/csv-export-formula/) 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](/docs/compare/owner-vs-tenant-concept/) 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.

## Related

- [Account and access](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/account/)
- [Which workspace you are in](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/account/workspace-resolution/)
- [Signing in with Google](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/account/google-sign-in/)
- [How your Google account binds to a person](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/account/identity-binding/)
- [Workspace isolation](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/security/workspace-isolation/)
- [Operator and customer, as a design idea](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/compare/owner-vs-tenant-concept/)

## What this page is based on

- Connect capability registry (docs-source/facts.py) — `workspace_resolution`, `google_sign_in`, `password_sign_in` (not yet), `session_replacement`, `rls_isolation`
- docs-source/facts.py — CANONICAL_TERMS and PRODUCTION.isolation_layers
- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md §9 — the thirteen record sheets