Inviting your team

Scout's price is set by how many people you gather each week, so adding someone to the dashboard never changes your bill. Invite everyone on staff who needs it. Pricing and refund policy has the bands.

Congregants don't need an invitation. Anyone already in your people list with an email on their record can sign in to the member app on their own. Invitations are for staff and leaders who need the dashboard.

Who can send one

Admins and Pastors. Reaching the invite screen takes two permissions at once: manage_settings to open Settings at all, and invite_team to use the Users tab. By default those two only travel together on Admin and Pastor, so a Staff, Finance, or Volunteer user lands on Access denied at /settings even though invite_team alone would let the API through.

Send an invite

1. 1

   Open Settings → Users

   On a computer, Settings is pinned below the nav groups in the left sidebar, and it's also in the profile menu at the top right. On a phone, it's in the More sheet. The page opens on Church Info, so click the Users tab. The heading reads Users with a count beside it. That count is staff and leaders only, because congregant accounts never appear on this list.

2. 2

   Click + Invite

   The dialog is titled Invite a user and opens on the Pick from People tab.

3. 3

   Choose who you're inviting

   Pick from People searches active people who don't have an account yet, and uses the email already on their record. It loads 50 at a time, so type a name into Search people… rather than scrolling for someone. If the person you pick has no email on file, sending fails with Email required. For someone who isn't in Scout at all, switch to Invite by email and fill in First name, Last name, and Email.

4. 4

   Pick a role, then send

   Pick one from the Role list. Each option carries a one-line description of what it can reach, and the note under the list reminds you that every role except Admin can be reshaped under Settings → Permissions. Click Send invite, then confirm — the dialog reads "Send an invite to {name}?" and names the role they'll join as. Leaving the role unpicked gives you Pick a role.

Which role to pick

The list shows every role your church has except Member, which is the member-app-only role and can't be invited into the dashboard. Out of the box you'll see five, plus any custom role your church has built:

• Admin: every permission, and the only role that can open Settings → Permissions. Admin itself is locked, so its own permissions can't be edited.
• Pastor: the same defaults as Admin for everyday work, including giving, refunds, imports, church settings, and inviting other people. Two things it doesn't get: editing role permissions, and releasing children at pickup.
• Staff: people, groups, teams, services, the volunteer schedule, check-in, forms, events, announcements, pastoral notes, and Scout's read on each person. Giving is held back on purpose.
• Finance: giving only. Gifts, funds, refunds, the giving report, and export. This is the role for a bookkeeper.
• Volunteer: check-in, team rosters, the serving schedule, groups, and events.

Only Admin is locked. Every other role can be reshaped in Settings → Permissions, so if the descriptions above don't match what you see, someone at your church has already tuned them. How roles work covers which roles you can edit and which you can delete, and What each permission controls covers what switching one off actually hides. If none of the five fit the job, an Admin can create a custom role and invite people into that.

Owner isn't a role

Owner is a flag on one person, the one who created the church. It never appears in the role list, so no invitation can create one. Only the owner sees the Billing link beside the Settings tabs.

To move it, make the other person an Admin first. Then open Settings → Users, click Edit on their row, and click Transfer ownership. The confirmation reads "Transfer ownership to {name}? You'll become an Admin and they'll gain billing & church-deletion rights." You become an Admin in the swap.

What the invitee receives

The email comes from your church's name at noreply@scout.church, so tell them to search their inbox for your church rather than for Scout. The subject reads "{Your name} invited you to {Your church} on Scout" and the button reads Accept invitation.

Clicking it opens Set up your account with their email filled in and locked. They can click Continue with Google, or type a password of at least 8 characters, repeat it under Confirm password, and click Set password & accept. The password field is labelled optional because Google is the alternative; the button stays disabled until a password is typed. Either way they land signed in with the role you picked. Inside the churchHQ app the Google button isn't shown, so they set a password there.

Accepting also links them to a person record. If they were already in your directory, Scout uses that record. If not, Scout creates one.

If they get in and then can't sign back in later, I can't log in walks through codes and passwords.

Pending invites

A sent invitation appears in Settings → Users below your staff list: the email, Expires with a date, and two chips reading Pending and the role name.

An invitation lasts 7 days. Nothing sweeps it when it lapses, so an expired one keeps showing as Pending with a date in the past. Once it has lapsed you can send a fresh invitation to the same address, and both rows will then sit in the list marked Pending. Only the newer link works.

If the email never arrives, have them check spam first. When Scout's email provider rejects the send, the invitation row is still created and the dialog closes as though it worked, so a send that failed looks identical to one that landed. The failure is recorded in Scout's server log and nowhere on screen.

Changing someone's role

Go to Settings → Users, click Edit on their row, pick a different role under Role, and click Save role. That button stays disabled until the role actually changes.

The change takes effect on their very next page load rather than at their next sign-in, because Scout re-reads their role from the database on every request. If you try to move your only Admin to another role, you'll get "Cannot demote the only Admin. Promote another Admin first."

Removing someone

Go to Settings → Users and click Edit on their row. Clicking their name does nothing; the control is the Edit button on the right. In the dialog, click the red Remove user, then click Remove user again in the confirmation that reads "Remove {name} from this church? Their account loses dashboard access."

You can't remove yourself, and you can't remove the owner. On both of those rows the button isn't shown at all. Transfer ownership first if the person leaving is the owner.

Their person record stays in your directory, and their pastoral notes stay with the church, because a note is filed against the person who wrote it and survives the login being deleted. Their audit-log entries stay too, though they'll read as System once the account is gone. Access ends on their next request.

Scout has no suspend or deactivate state. Changing the role and removing the user are the two options.