Invite your team and assign seats
Everyone who signs in to ProjectSmith needs a seat. You buy seats for the workspace, then give one to each person you invite. Only the workspace Owner and Admins can invite people.
Member or Planner?
Section titled “Member or Planner?”| Member seat | Planner seat | |
|---|---|---|
| Who it’s for | Technicians and engineers | Project managers, service delivery managers, team leads |
| Boards, tasks and the project timeline | Yes | Yes |
| My time: log time, timer, submit the week | Yes | Yes |
| Request leave | Yes | Yes |
| Raise approval requests | Yes | Yes |
| See their own utilisation | Yes | Yes |
| See their own capacity and reserve their own hours | Yes | Yes |
| Portfolio, team capacity planning, allocations | Yes | |
| Approve time and decide requests | Yes | |
| Budgets, billing plans and reports | Yes | |
| Create projects and board templates | Yes | |
| Price per person per month | US$20 | US$59 |
A Member seat is for keeping track of time and working your own tasks. Anything more is Planner work, so a project manager needs a Planner seat: creating projects and editing their details, columns and phases, approvals, budgets, planning other people and the team’s reports. Only people with a Planner seat can be chosen as a project’s manager.
Owners and Admins administer users, billing and settings on any seat: who can manage the workspace depends on the person’s role, not their seat. See Roles and sections and Plans and billing.
The minimum
Section titled “The minimum”A workspace always holds at least 1 Planner seat and 2 Member seats: US$99/month (1 Planner + 2 Members). You can buy more at any time, but you can’t go below that.
Invite someone
Section titled “Invite someone”- In ProjectSmith, go to Settings > Users.
- Choose Invite.
- Enter the person’s work email address. Use the address they will sign in with. If your company uses Microsoft 365, that’s their Microsoft 365 address.
- Choose their role (most people are Member) and their seat (Member or Planner).
- Send the invitation.
Screenshot placeholder: the Invite dialog on Settings > Users, with the email, role and seat fields.
The person receives an email with a Create your account button. The first time, they create their ProjectSmith account with the email address the invitation was sent to: the invitation is accepted and they land in your workspace. After that, they just sign in. If your workspace uses Sign in with Microsoft, the button says Sign in with Microsoft instead, and they sign in with their work account. If they use a different address, ProjectSmith can’t match them to the invitation; resend it to the right address.
From the Users page you can also resend an invitation that has gone astray, or revoke one that was sent by mistake. Revoking frees the seat straight away.
Change someone’s seat or role
Section titled “Change someone’s seat or role”- Go to Settings > Users and select the person.
- Change their seat (Member, Planner or none) or their role.
- Save. The change applies the next time they load a page.
To remove someone’s access, deactivate them. Their time entries, comments and history stay; they can no longer sign in, and their seat is freed for someone else.
People without a seat still count
Section titled “People without a seat still count”When you connect Autotask, every Autotask resource appears in ProjectSmith as a person, whether or not they hold a seat. They show up in capacity planning and the utilisation report, so your plan covers everyone who does the work. They just can’t sign in.
You don’t pay for people without a seat. Pay for the people who use ProjectSmith; plan for everyone.
When you invite someone whose email matches an Autotask resource, ProjectSmith links the two automatically, so their Autotask time and tickets line up with their ProjectSmith account.
Common questions
Section titled “Common questions”Does the person need to be in Autotask? No, but they should be if they log time. Time is written to Autotask as the person who logged it, so they need a matching Autotask resource.
Can a Member be promoted to Planner later? Yes. Change their seat on the Users page. If you have no free Planner seat, buy one first.
What happens to a deactivated person’s time? Nothing. Approved time is already in Autotask, and ProjectSmith keeps the history.