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Departments and who can see what
How to divide an account so a colleague sees their own team’s work and not everyone’s.
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A department is a label on work, so that Tax's engagement letters and their fees stay out of Audit's lists. It decides where work is filed. What each person is allowed to see is set separately, on each person, so one colleague can be limited to their own teams while another sees everything. Both screens are for owners and administrators.
Nothing here applies until you want it to. A company that never creates a second department never meets the concept, and everyone carries on seeing all of the company's work.
Creating one
Open Settings, then Departments. The box at the foot of the list reads Add a department: Tax, Audit, Payroll…; type a name and press Add. Manage on a row opens it so you can give it a Name and a Description (optional) and press Save.
The same panel shows Who is in that department. To put somebody in it, or take them out, go to Settings, then People, and open their row.
There is always one department badged Company-wide. Everyone in the company sees work filed there, member or not, and it cannot be retired. It is where work lands when whoever created it belongs to no other department, which is what stops anything falling out of sight.
Retire takes a department out of use. Work already filed against it stays where it is and everyone who could see it still can; retiring only stops new work being filed there. Restore brings it back.
Deciding what somebody sees
On Settings, then People, open a person. The panel asks four questions, and the third asks what that person can see. There are three answers.
The first is Everything in the company: every envelope, proposal and document in the company, and every fee on them. This is where everybody starts. An envelope is a bundle sent for signature: the documents, the people and the fields.
The second limits them to the departments you have ticked, plus anything filed company-wide. Its wording names those departments as you tick them, and names the teams the person will not see, so the consequence is on screen before you commit rather than discovered by a colleague a week later.
The third limits them to only what they create themselves: their own work and nothing else, not even the rest of their own department's.
Administrators always see everything in the company. It comes from the role, so while Administrator is switched on the choice above is fixed, and turning it on tells you what it will replace before you do it.
What the boundary covers
Envelopes, proposals, bulk sends, documents, folder contents, recipients, notifications and every dashboard, activity and analytics figure. Counts are computed over what the person can actually open, so nobody sees a total of forty seven above a list of three.
Client records themselves stay shared, because the same client buys tax, audit and payroll and splitting the record would give you three of them. What hangs off a client is scoped: a colleague can see that a company is a client without seeing another team's engagement letter or its fee.
One carve out matters and is deliberate. Somebody who is a recipient of a document keeps access to what they were personally asked to sign, and to their own signed copy afterwards, whichever department it belongs to.
Filing new work
Where a person belongs to more than one department, the envelope and proposal wizards offer a department to file the work against, alongside a choice that lets CecurSign decide. Anything with no choice made goes to the company-wide department, where everyone can see it. Retired departments are never offered.