Your personal account versus a company account

Video Showing How Organizations and Workspaces Work

 Everyone Has their Own Personal Account

Every person who signs up with Pie or is invited to a task or a project will get their own personal Pie account. That's it!

If that person is invited as a new user by another Pie user, when the new users signs up, they will see their own personal organization and the organization of the other person.

Is there a Company Account?

So, what about a company account? Well, we have a smarter way than the traditional company account application. We use objects called "Organizations" and "Workspaces".

Let's say you want to use Pie for a business and you're the first person getting started to set this up.

The solution is to set up an "Organization" object in your personal account (or rename your personal organization to your business name). When you create an organization, you are automatically the Organization Admin. This means you have power to create workspaces under that organization object.

Let's say you name it Zen Consulting. Then you can create workspace under it to contain projects. For example, you can have a workspace called Human Resources and one called Client Services.

Now the fun starts! You can start adding other team members from your business to the workspaces. For example, let's say you added Huck Livingston to Client Services since he's one of your project managers.

When you add him, the application will trigger off an email to Huck with the link to sign up. When he does, he now will get his OWN personal Pie account with his own organization and workspaces called Huck's Organization, but yet will see and have access to your Zen Consulting Client Services organization and workspace.

As you can see, Pie manages a company via the Organization and its workspaces.

Let's say that Huck moves on to another company and you no longer want him to have access to your Zen Consulting workspaces. No problem. Just remove him. He will not only lose the ability to see Zen, but also any associated projects in Zen will be gone from his view.

However, the cool thing about this approach is that Huck still has his own personal Pie account with his own personal organization with workspaces for his own use. If he ever comes back to your company or starts to partner with you on projects, then with a couple clicks you can bring him back with certain permissions and visibility.

By the way, you can add a new team member directly from a project or from a task in a project without needing to go to the Workspace page. It will do the same thing where that new person will get an auto invite from you to join your workspace (and organization if you're using that feature).

In summary, there's not a specific company account, but rather a personal account with company workspace access.

We call this the federated approach, which gives you and your company more flexibility. One cool feature is the ability to pass your company's Organization Admin or Workspace Admin permission over to another person in your company if you happen to move on. Or, you can share that powerful admin permission with other people in your company. Either way, this model gives you and the rest of our customers more flexibility than traditional enterprise productivity software.

How does Billing Work if I Want to Upgrade?

Each organization has its own BILLING function. This means one organization and its workspaces can be on a Free Plan and a different one can be on a Pro or Enterprise Plan.

Each organization BILLING page is set up to contain a credit card payment account. You can have different credit cards for paying different organization premium plans.

You can go to this help page to learn about upgrading to the Pro or Enterprise plan.