Add a human teammate

Paperclip companies aren't single-player. You can bring other people in as board members — a co-founder who watches the same agents, an operator who triages the inbox, a viewer who just wants read access to the dashboard. This is the end-to-end flow, done from the app: you create an invite link, they open it and ask to join, and you approve them.

The whole round-trip takes a couple of minutes. Invites are copy-link only — Paperclip doesn't email anyone, so you share the link yourself.

Before you start: creating invites needs the users:invite permission, and approving the person who shows up needs joins:approve. Owners and Admins have both by default. If you're not sure what you hold, see Roles & Permissions.

1. Decide what role they should land in

Every invite carries a default role that gets attached to the join request so you can see it in context at approval time. Pick the smallest role that lets them do their job:

• Viewer — read-only. Good for stakeholders.
• Operator — can assign tasks. The default, and the right call for most hands-on teammates.
• Admin — can also invite people, create agents, and approve joins.
• Owner — full control, including managing other members' permissions.

You can always change this after they're in (step 5), so don't overthink it. The full breakdown is in Roles & Permissions.

2. Create the invite link

Open Settings → Invites. In the Create invite card, pick the default role from step 1 — each option shows a short description of what that role gets — and click Create invite. Paperclip does three things at once:

1. generates a fresh, single-use invite link against your current Paperclip domain;
2. copies the URL to your clipboard (if the browser allows it — otherwise a toast tells you to copy it manually);
3. drops the link into the Latest invite link panel, and adds a row to the Invite history table below with an Active badge.

The Open invite button next to the link lets you preview the join page in another tab. The link is single-use and expires after 72 hours — if it goes stale, just create another. For the full page tour, see Company Administration → Invites.

3. Share the link

Send the URL however you normally share a secret — a DM, your password manager, a private channel. Anyone who opens an active link can file a join request against your company, so treat it like a short-lived password and don't post it anywhere public. Changed your mind about one that's still outstanding? Hit Revoke on its row in the Invite history table.

4. Your teammate opens the link and requests to join

When they open the URL they land on a Paperclip join page branded with your company's name and logo. If they don't have an account yet, the page walks them through sign-up first, then returns them to the invite. Accepting does not grant access immediately — it creates a pending join request tied to the invite, capturing their name, email, and source IP for you to review.

On their side they see a "waiting for approval" state. Nothing they do from here touches your company data until you approve them.

5. Approve them (and fine-tune access)

There are two places in the app to approve, both showing the requester and the invite context before you decide:

• Settings → Access — when there are pending human joins, a Pending human joins card sits above the members list with Approve human / Reject human buttons on each entry. This is the quickest path.
• Join Request Queue (/inbox/requests) — the full queue for both human and agent requests, with Status and Request type filters. Each card carries the requester, the invite context, and the submission details.

Click Approve human and the person becomes an active member with the invite's default role. To adjust their role or hand out extra permissions, stay on Settings → Access, click Edit on their row, and set the role, status, and any explicit grants in the grants grid, then save. (Explicit grants stick even if you later change their role — see Roles & Permissions.)

6. Verify

They now appear in Settings → Access with an active status badge and the role you gave them. That's it — they can sign in and see the company. Every step above (invite created, join requested, approved, membership activated) is written to the activity log, so the whole onboarding is auditable after the fact.

Prefer the terminal? CLI equivalents

Every step above has a CLI counterpart, handy for scripting onboarding. They map one-to-one onto the same API the UI uses. See the Access CLI reference for exact payloads.

# Create the invite (returns the invite URL)
paperclipai invite create --company-id <company-id> --payload-json '{"role":"operator"}'

# See who's waiting, then approve
paperclipai join list --company-id <company-id> --status pending
paperclipai join approve <request-id> --company-id <company-id>

# Confirm they're in
paperclipai member list --company-id <company-id>

Revoke an outstanding invite with paperclipai invite revoke <invite-id> (note: that takes the invite ID, not the token).

Related

• Company Administration — the Access, Invites, and Join Requests pages in full.
• Roles & Permissions — what each role and grant actually allows.
• Offboard a member — the reverse direction when someone leaves.
• Enable multi-user login — required first if your instance is still in local trusted mode.