Invite a member and give them the right access
The Members section is your team. Invite by email, pick the role, and decide which activities the person can reach.
The Members section lists everyone who has access to your place. It also shows pending invitations — people you invited who haven't accepted yet. That is useful: an invitation still pending after two weeks is usually a misspelled address.
Each member carries three things: their role (what they may do), their activities (what they may see) and their groups (who work gets assigned to). These are three different questions, and mixing them up is the most common source of confusion.
Where: left navigation bar, under Organization → Members.
Inviting someone
The Invite member button opens a window that asks for everything at once.
The invitation window.
- 1The email. It is the only required field.
- 2The email language: French or English. It is preselected in the language of your app.
- 3Groups, optional. They are applied automatically when the person accepts.
- 4The activity restriction. Unchecked, the member sees every activity in the place.
- 5The role. One per member.
Everything you set here is attached to the invitation, not applied right away. The role, activities and groups take effect the moment the person accepts. So there is nothing to redo afterwards.
Choosing the email language
The invitation email goes out in the language you pick, French or English, even if the person already has a Sentinel account in the other language. The choice is preselected in the language of your app: remember to change it when you invite someone who doesn't read that language. The mobile app offers the same choice on its Invite member screen.
Following up on or correcting a pending invitation
A pending invitation is clicked just like a member: it opens in the same panel. You see who sent it and when, whether it has already been resent, and you can still correct the email language, the role on arrival, the groups, the work role and the activities before the person accepts.
At the bottom of the panel, Resend the email nudges the person again in the chosen language, and Remove invitation cancels it. Picked the wrong language? Change it, click Save, then Resend the email. A misspelled address can't be corrected, though: remove the invitation, then invite again with the right address.
What reaches the invited person
It depends on one thing: do they already have a Sentinel account?
They already have an account and already work in a place. The invitation appears directly in their app, in two spots: a Pending invitation button at the top of the screen, and the notification bell, under the Invitations tab. It doesn't matter which place they have open at that moment: an invitation is addressed to them, not to a place, and they see it everywhere. They also get a push notification on their phone and an email, depending on what they enabled in their notification preferences. The email follows the language you picked; the notifications show up in the language of their app.
They don't have an account yet, or don't belong to any place. They get an email with a link. Once they enter their address and their verification code, your invitation greets them on their landing screen with an Accept button — there is nothing to hunt for.
That is why an invitation can stay pending for a while without anything being broken: the person still has to act on their side.
How the person accepts
Either way the gesture is the same: Accept brings them into the place, Decline removes the invitation with no other effect.
The invitation received, in the notification bell.
- 1The Invitations tab counts the invitations they haven't read yet, whichever place is open.
- 2Clicking the notification opens the invitation menu right away, with Accept and Decline.
The Pending invitation button and its menu.
- 1The badge shows how many invitations are pending.
- 2Accept brings the person into the place. Decline removes the invitation, with no other effect.
The notification goes away once the invitation is handled. Accepted, declined or withdrawn on your side, the invitation has nothing left to ask: its notification disappears from the bell and no longer raises any counter. If you resend an invitation, the person still sees only one, the most recent.
The moment they accept, Sentinel switches their active place to yours and applies the role, activities and groups from the invitation in one go. They land straight in the right context, with the right permissions.
A person can belong to several places: accepting your invitation does not make them lose the others, it simply changes the one they are looking at.
Choosing the right role
The role answers the question: what is this person allowed to do? Three roles exist out of the box:
| Role | For whom |
|---|---|
| Viewer | Can only look at tasks and projects. For a partner or an official you want to give visibility to |
| Editor | Can create, edit and assign tasks and projects. This is the role for most of the field team |
| Admin | Can also manage place settings, the subscription, and invite other members |
A member has only one role. If none of the three fits, the Roles section lets you build a custom one, with the access level you want section by section.
When in doubt, give Editor. The role can be changed at any time from the member's sheet, and the change is immediate.
Deciding on activities
This is the most misunderstood setting, because it is not about permissions but about scope.
If your place runs several activities — mountain biking, hiking, cross-country skiing — each has its own trails, tasks and conditions. The activity restriction decides which ones the person sees. In the invitation window it is a checkbox; on the member's sheet, a choice between All activities and Only some.
All activities (default): the member has access to every activity in the place, including ones you add later. That is what you want most of the time.
Only some: you pick the activities, and you must select at least one. The member will only see those. Useful for a ski club volunteer who has no business in the biking tasks, or for a contractor hired on a single network.
Worth remembering: role and activities combine. An Admin restricted to cross-country skiing can do everything — but only in cross-country skiing.
A member's sheet
Click a row in the list: the sheet opens in a panel on the right, and the list stays visible on the left. To move to another member, just click their row — the panel switches person and keeps the tab you were on. The ✕ closes the panel.
The header reminds you who it is: avatar, name, then their role and work role. Four tabs split the rest.
Informations: changing access
This is where you change what was decided at invitation time.
A member's sheet, open on the Informations tab.
- 1The open member stays highlighted in the list.
- 2The sheet's four tabs.
- 3The ⋯ menu holds Remove member.
- 4Activities: All activities, or Only some, picked from the list that appears.
- 5The save bar only appears once something has changed.
Four settings, in this order:
- Role: what the person is allowed to do. The menu shows, under each role, what it allows.
- Groups: the member receives the tasks and checklists assigned to their groups.
- Work role: the rate their time is priced at. This field only shows if your place has work roles.
- Activities: All activities (the default) or Only some, then the list of allowed activities.
Changes only go out when you click Save, in the bar that appears at the bottom of the panel. Cancel puts the sheet back the way it was. If you close the panel or click another member with unsaved edits, the app stops you and asks what to do: you don't lose your work to a stray click.
The header's ⋯ menu holds Remove member, which asks for confirmation before acting. It takes the person out of the place: their Sentinel account stays intact, and so do their tasks and history. They simply lose access to your place.
Recent activity: what the person did
The Recent activity tab.
- 1The filter keeps a single category: tasks, structures, checklists, discussions, trails, time or administration.
- 2Actions are grouped by day, most recent first.
- 3Under each sentence, the item affected and what kind it is. ×3 marks the same action repeated in a row on the same item.
- 4Older actions load as you reach the bottom of the list.
This is the log of that member's actions in your place, written as sentences: "Created the task", "Completed the checklist", "Deleted a file". The icon gives the category at a glance, and an orange bin marks a deletion. Under the sentence, the item affected is named in bold: clicking a task opens it right away. An item deleted since keeps its name, with a note that it was deleted.
The log can hold years of history: it loads page by page as you scroll, and stays fast even for a very active member. Nothing is editable here — it's a record, not a tool.
Two concrete uses: understanding who changed what when a piece of data surprises you, and checking that a new hire actually got to grips with the tool in their first weeks. The filter helps with the first one: pick Trails to see only trail edits, for example.
Connections: when, and on which device
The Connections tab.
- 1Presence: one box per day over two weeks, one row for the mobile app and one for the web app. The number counts openings; the darker the box, the more often the person opened the app that day.
- 2The devices the person is signed in on right now, with their approximate city. Online means the device talked to Sentinel in the last five minutes.
- 3A device that has been silent for more than two weeks shows in orange: an old phone, a shared computer.
- 4The filters: platform (mobile or web) and kind of event (sign-ins and sign-outs, or openings).
- 5The feed, day by day. ×4 groups repeated openings on the same device.
This tab answers two questions: is the person really using the tool? and which devices is their account signed in on? The presence strip reads at a glance; clicking a day takes the feed to that day.
The feed records every sign-in, every sign-out and every time the app is opened, on mobile as on the web. Several openings within 30 minutes on the same device count as one. The history is kept for 180 days, then erased automatically. If the person also works for another organization in Sentinel, you only see what they did while your place was open.
To sign out a device, open its ⋯ menu; Sign out everywhere closes all their sessions at once. Handy when a phone is lost or an employee leaves the team. The person will have to enter a new sign-in code on that device, and none of their work is lost. The action leaves a trace in the feed, with your name. The place's owner can't be signed out by someone else, and you can't sign yourself out from here.
Timesheet: the person's week
The Timesheet tab, panel widened.
- 1On this tab the panel widens and the list keeps only the names. This button shrinks it or widens it again.
- 2The week on display: the arrows move to the previous or next week, This week brings you back.
- 3The grid: one row per task or checklist, one column per day, and each day's total at the bottom.
- 4Every entry of the week, with its description and the person who logged it.
The tab shows the member's time entries, week by week. So it only fills up if the team records its time: with no entries, the week stays empty.
The grid answers "what did they do on Tuesday?" and "how many hours on the footbridge this week?" at a glance. Underneath, the list of entries is for checking and correcting: the pencil edits an entry, the bin deletes it. The Logged by column tells you who recorded the hours — often the crew lead, for everyone.
To see the whole team over a period rather than one person at a time, or to export to Excel, use the Timesheets section — see Log time on a task.
Who can do all this
The Members section needs write access to Members (Edit), like everything in the sidebar's Organization universe. At View, it doesn't appear in the menu: the person still finds their colleagues wherever their work calls for it — in a task's Assigned to field, for example — but not the team list or the member pages.
Once in the section, each action needs its own write access:
| Action | Right at Edit |
|---|---|
| Change a member's groups and activities, remove them from the place | Members |
| Sign out a member's device | Members |
| Invite someone, manage a pending invitation | Invitations |
| Change a member's role, invite with a role other than Viewer | Roles |
| Change a member's work role | Work roles |
If the Invite member button doesn't appear for you, the Invitations right is what you're missing.