Note: Some Gridium accounts do not yet have user management features enabled. If you’re looking for these settings but they’re not available, please contact support@gridium.com.
Gridium’s user invitation system lets account admins and full users add new people to your account, set their access level building by building, and control who gets in. Invitations either go through automatically based on your account’s settings, or wait for review by an account admin.
This page covers how invitations flow through the system, what each role can do, and how to manage pending and denied invitations from your account settings.
User roles
Each person on your account has a role on each building, and an optional admin flag at the account level.
- Viewer. Read-only access to a building’s data. Viewers can see usage, costs, and reports for buildings they’re assigned to, but they cannot change building settings or invite other users.
- Full user. Read and modify access to a building’s data, including the ability to manage other users’ access to that building. Full users can invite new people to any building they have access to.
- Account admin. Granted at the account level rather than per building. Account admins can change account-wide settings, manage building groups, approve or deny pending invitations, and adjust the user approval settings. An account can have any number of admins.
Roles are set per building, so the same person can be a full user on one building and a viewer on another. For more detail on what each role can do and how to set roles after a user is on the account, see Managing users and permissions.
Inviting a new user
You can invite users from two places:
- The account users page, available in the account settings menu. (This is only available to account admins.)
- A building’s contacts page, available from the building info section.
To start an invitation, click the Invite a user button. You’ll be prompted for the new person’s email, name, title, and phone number, followed by their access level for each building you have access to.
After you submit the invitation, what happens next depends on your account’s user approval settings, the inviter’s role, and the new user’s email domain.
Auto-approval by email domain
If your account is configured to automatically approve users from specific domains, invitations from full users are checked against the account’s auto-approve domain list. When the new user’s email matches a domain on the list, the invitation is approved automatically: the user becomes active immediately and receives a welcome email with a link to set up their account. If the email doesn’t match any domain on the list, the invitation goes to the pending queue for an admin to review.
A few cases bypass this check:
- Invitations sent by an account admin always take effect immediately, regardless of the new user’s domain.
- If your account is set to automatically approve all users, every invitation takes effect immediately, regardless of who sent it or what domain it’s for.
- If your account is set to require admin approval for all new users, every invitation from a full user goes to the pending queue, regardless of domain.
For details on configuring user approval and the auto-approve domain list, see Account security settings.
The pending queue
When an invitation isn’t auto-approved, it goes into a pending queue and waits for an account admin to review it. The new user does not yet have access; they won’t receive a welcome email until the invitation is approved.
When a new pending invitation is created:
- An email is sent to every account admin asking them to review the request.
- The pending user appears at the top of the account users page, sorted ahead of active users.
- The pending user also appears on the users list for any building they were invited to, so the inviter can confirm the request landed.
If your account has no admins at the time the invitation arrives, Gridium support is notified and will help process the request.
Reviewing a pending invitation
To review pending invitations, open the account users page from the settings menu. Pending users appear at the top of the list with a status indicator.
For each pending invitation, you can:
- Click the check icon to approve. The new user becomes active, receives a welcome email with a setup link, and gains access to whatever buildings were specified in the original invitation.
- Click the X icon to deny. The new user is not notified directly; instead, the person who issued the invitation receives an email letting them know the request was denied.
When you approve or deny, the original inviter is also notified by email so they know the outcome.
Denied invitations
Denied invitations are not deleted. They appear on a separate denied invitations list, available from the account settings menu. If an invitation was denied by mistake, an account admin can review the denied list and re-approve the user, which moves them to active status without requiring a new invitation.
If someone re-invites a previously denied user, the new invitation goes through the standard approval flow again rather than reusing the old denied record.