# Account and access

> How organizations, workspaces, members, roles, and service accounts control ownership and access in Hodoflow.

Hodoflow nests your work two levels deep. An **organization** is the account —
usually one per company — and it is the hard boundary that keeps your data away
from everybody else's. A **workspace** is an environment inside that
organization, so you can keep production separate from whatever you are still
experimenting with.

## Organizations

An organization owns its members and every workflow, dashboard, and record
created inside it. Its data lives in its own isolated database schema, which is
the boundary the platform enforces at the storage layer rather than in
application code.

You can belong to more than one organization. The switcher at the top-left of
the app, showing your organization's initial and name, moves you between them,
and your choice is remembered for next time. Note that the organization you are
working in comes from that choice — not from the address you visited — so there
is no URL to memorize or share.

**Settings → Organization** shows the organization's name, its type (demo or
production), and when it was created. Owners and admins can rename it from
**Edit**. Owners get one more control there: **Transfer ownership**, which hands
the owner role to another active member and leaves you as an admin.

## Workspaces

Every organization has at least one workspace, created for you at signup and
marked **Default**. Whatever you build belongs to the workspace you were in when
you built it — its workflows, dashboards, widgets, data models, connectors,
imported API Specs, and credentials.

Switch workspaces from the picker immediately to the right of your organization
in the top bar. Switching changes what the whole app shows: a different set of
workflows, a different set of dashboards, different records in the warehouse.
Your selection persists across sessions, and the default workspace is what you
fall back to if you have never chosen one.

Owners and admins manage the list from **Settings → Workspaces**:

- **New workspace** adds one — "Staging" and "Production" are the usual pair.
- **Rename** changes its name.
- **Delete** removes a workspace along with everything scoped to it. This cannot
  be undone, and the default workspace cannot be deleted at all, since it is
  what members fall back to.

Workspaces partition data, not people: any active member of the organization can
reach every workspace in it. If you need a genuinely separate set of people, that
is a separate organization.

## Members and roles

**Settings → Users** lists everyone with access. **Invite User** sends an
invitation by email containing a one-click sign-in link; invitations expire after
seven days, and you can resend one that went stale.

There are three roles:

| Role | Can do |
|---|---|
| **Owner** | Everything, including transferring ownership. Exactly one per organization. |
| **Admin** | Manage members and integrations, on top of everything a member can do. |
| **Member** | Use workflows, dashboards, and data. |

You cannot change your own role — ask another admin or the owner. The owner's
role is not editable from the user editor either; moving it requires the
**Transfer ownership** flow on the Organization page.

## Deactivating access

People are deactivated, never deleted. There is no remove button, because
removing an account would orphan the history of everything that account created.

Open a person from **Settings → Users**, choose **Edit**, and use the **Status**
section. **Deactivate** takes their access away immediately, and their row stays
in the list marked **Inactive**. An owner can **Reactivate** them later, which
restores access at whatever role they held.

Someone whose access was deactivated and who has no other organization sees a
**No active workspace** page when they sign in, telling them an admin can restore
their access.

## Service accounts

People sign in; systems do not. When an external service needs to talk to your
organization — pushing data at a webhook, rendering an embedded dashboard,
reading data over the API — it authenticates with a service account rather than
someone's login.

They live under **Settings → Service Accounts**. See
[Service accounts](/help/credentials-connections/service-accounts) for scopes, rotation, and
setup.

## Demo organizations and trials

Signing up creates a demo organization that lasts **seven days**. It is a real
organization with nothing withheld, and each account gets one — if you have
already used yours, signing up again will not create another.

On the final day, a banner appears across the top of the app: *Last day of your
trial*, with the exact time access ends and a **Move to production** button that
opens a message to the Hodoflow team.

When the seven days run out, the organization is **deactivated, not deleted**.
Your data is still there, and reaching out can get the demo switched back on or
moved to a production organization. Only after a further grace period — around a
month from signup, if nothing changes — is a deactivated demo organization and
its data permanently purged.

Production organizations do not expire.