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 they're in.

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. Owners and Admins have it 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 role, and that's the role your teammate gets the moment they accept. 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.

The Invites tab of the Members page, with the Invite a person card

Open Settings → Members and switch to the Invites tab. In the Invite a person card, pick the role from step 1 under Choose a role — 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.

Use the Copy link button next to the URL if you need to copy it again. The link is single-use and expires after 72 hours — if it goes stale, just create another. For the full tour, see Company Administration → Invites.

Send the URL however you normally share a secret — a DM, your password manager, a private channel. Whoever accepts an active link joins your company with the role it carries, 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.

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. Once they're signed in and accept, they join right away with the invite's role — there's no approval step for human invites. They see You joined the organization and an Open board button.

Paperclip still records a join request behind the scenes, already approved, so the invite's Join request column and the audit trail stay complete.

If they see "Email and password sign up is not enabled": your instance has self-service sign-up turned off, so the invitee can't create the account they need to accept the invite. This is controlled by the auth.disableSignUp config field (or the PAPERCLIP_AUTH_DISABLE_SIGN_UP environment variable). To let invited teammates register, make sure sign-up is enabled — set auth.disableSignUp to false (its default) or confirm PAPERCLIP_AUTH_DISABLE_SIGN_UP isn't set to true — then restart the instance and have them reopen the invite link. See Enable multi-user login for the full authenticated-mode setup.

5. Fine-tune their access

Your teammate is already an active member with the invite's role. To adjust their role or hand out extra permissions, open Settings → Members, 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.)

Seeing a pending request anyway? Requests filed before human invites started joining people instantly can still be waiting. If you hold joins:approve, a Pending human joins card sits above the members list with Approve human / Reject human buttons. The full Join Request Queue (/inbox/requests) covers both human and agent requests, with Status and Request type filters — today it's mostly where agent requests land.

The Join Request Queue with its Status and Request type filters; the list is empty when nothing is waiting

6. Verify

They now appear in Settings → Members 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, invite accepted, 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"}'

# Human invites join on accept; agent requests (and any older
# pending ones) still need approval
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).