Team, roles and permissions

ErmisAI has exactly three workspace roles: Owner, Admin and Member. That is the whole model. There is no viewer, no read-only seat, no per-desk reviewer scope, and no way to invent a fourth role.

Everything else you see next to a person's name — Editor-in-Chief, Managing Editor, Desk Editor, Reporter — is a job title. Titles are free text. They change nothing about what someone can do.

Your own role is printed in the left sidebar, directly under the publication name, and again at the top of Settings as "Owner controls for the newsroom.", "Admin controls for the newsroom." or "Member controls for the newsroom."

Three things must be true before you can invite anyone

The Team section only appears in Settings when all of the following hold:

1. You are an Owner or an Admin.
2. The newsroom is a team newsroom — the one created when you chose "A team newsroom" during setup. A personal desk ("A desk of one") has no Team section at all, on any plan.
3. The subscription is on a plan that includes team management: Business Plus, Business Pro or Enterprise.

Miss any of the three and the section is simply not in the settings navigation. If you try the invite anyway, the answer is "Team management requires a Business or Enterprise plan."

Plans and seat counts are covered in Plan and quota reference.

What each role can do

Three of these deserve a sentence each.

Billing and Integrations are Owner-only, with no read-only mode. An Admin does not get a greyed-out Billing tab; the tab is absent. The WordPress connect screen says "Only owners and admins can connect WordPress sites." — that wording is wrong. Admins are blocked there too.

There is no separate approval permission. Anyone who can open the Editorial board can approve, reject and send back. See Editorial review and approval.

Members cannot see the roster. On the story screen the Editorial handoff panel's Owner list is disabled for them, with the note "Owner assignment is available to editorial assignment roles." They can still submit their own work; they just cannot hand it to a named colleague.

One rough edge: the "Clean feed" button on the feed is hidden from Admins in a team newsroom, even though an Admin is allowed to use it. Owners see it.

Job titles are labels, not permissions

Every person has an optional Title, up to 80 characters, typed free-hand. The field offers nine suggestions — Editor-in-Chief, Managing Editor, Desk Editor, Reporter, Producer, Analyst, Publisher, Contributor, Freelancer — but you can type anything.

When you pick a role in the invite form, a matching title is filled in for you: Owner suggests Editor-in-Chief, Admin suggests Managing Editor, Member suggests Reporter. Overwrite it freely. Nothing reads it.

Titles are not entirely cosmetic in one respect: nobody can finish newsroom setup without one. Leaving it blank and pressing "Go to press" returns "Add your title before finishing onboarding". Every member sets their own — it is the one workspace field a Member can always write.

The Team screen

Settings → Team. Heading "Team management", subheading "Manage invites, roles, and workspace access."

At the top, when a seat limit resolves for the plan, a "Seats in use" bar shows a used-over-limit figure. Both active members and pending invitations count against it. An invitation nobody has accepted still occupies a seat. Business Plus and Business Pro include five seats. An Enterprise subscription with no seat number is unmetered, and the bar is not shown at all.

Seat count itself is not editable here. Seats are chosen at checkout, in the plan comparison on the Billing section, which is Owner-only. See Billing and AI capacity.

Below that sits the "Invite member" form, then the "Members" table with seven columns: Name, Email, Role, Title, Status, Last active, Actions.

• Status prints the raw value active or invited, untranslated.
• Last active shows "Not yet active" for anyone with no timestamp yet. It reflects the last time the account record itself was updated, not the last time that person opened ErmisAI — do not use it to decide who is idle.
• Actions is a single button: "Revoke invite" on an invited row, "Remove" on an active one.

There is no pending-review count, no throughput figure, and no per-person editorial metric anywhere on this screen.

Inviting someone

Which roles the dropdown offers depends on you. An Owner can invite at any of the three roles. An Admin can invite Admins and Members only — Owner does not appear in their list.

Common refusals:

What a new member sees on their first sign-in

An invited person walks the same four-step setup wizard as a founder — Workspace, Identity, Coverage, Sources — even though the newsroom is already configured. Only their "Your title" is kept. Anything they type into the publication name, desk name, beat or source list is discarded without a message, unless they hold Owner or Admin.

The rest of the wizard is described in Set up your newsroom.

Changing a role or a title

Both are edited in place in the Members table: pick a new value in the Role dropdown, or type over the Title field. Each change saves on its own and confirms with "Member updated".

Rows you are not allowed to touch are disabled rather than hidden. An Admin sees Owner rows locked — role, title and removal all greyed out — because permission to change someone depends on the role they hold now, not the role you want to give them.

Two rules that catch people out:

• You cannot change your own role. The answer is "Change your own workspace access from another owner or admin account." Someone else has to do it.
• Re-roling a pending invitation re-issues it. The original invitation is cancelled and a fresh one is sent, so any link the person already has stops working. Warn them, or they will report a broken invite.

Removing someone

Press "Remove" on an active row, or "Revoke invite" on a pending one. Confirmation is a "Member removed" toast. There is no undo — re-invite them if it was a mistake.

What happens to the person: they lose access to this newsroom and land back in their own personal desk, which they own. What happens to their work: it stays. Articles, drafts and settings belong to the newsroom, not the person who typed them.

You cannot remove yourself: "Remove your own account from another owner or admin account." Deleting your ErmisAI account entirely is a different action, in Settings → Account — see Your account and your data.

The last owner cannot be removed

A team newsroom must always have at least one Owner. Demoting or removing the final Owner is refused with "At least one owner must remain assigned to the workspace."

So handing over the newsroom is a two-step move, and the order matters: promote the incoming Owner first, then have them demote or remove you. There is no "transfer ownership" button, and you cannot demote yourself even after a second Owner exists.

If the newsroom ends up with no owner

It can still happen — an Owner can leave through the account provider's own screens, which do not go through the checks above. When ErmisAI notices a newsroom with no Owner, it promotes the longest-serving Admin automatically. If there is no Admin, it promotes the longest-serving Member. Seniority here means who joined the newsroom first, and it is not something you can influence.

Two notices appear in the notification inbox: the promoted person gets "You are now the workspace owner", and the newsroom gets "Workspace ownership transferred". Both are in English regardless of the interface language.

What changes if the subscription lapses

If billing goes past due or the subscription is cancelled, the newsroom reverts to Free limits everywhere, and new invitations are refused with the same Business-plan message. Existing members keep their roles and keep working, minus everything the Free plan does not include.

The Team section may still be visible in that state — visibility follows the contracted plan, but the invite itself follows the payment status. Settle the invoice from the Billing section to restore it.

Things ErmisAI does not have

Stated plainly, because the vocabulary invites the assumption:

• No viewer or read-only role. Someone either has one of the three roles or has no access.
• No desks. There is no desk object, no desk membership, no routing of drafts to a desk, and no per-desk reviewer. The "Desk or team name" field in Settings is a label on the newsroom, nothing more.
• No editorial assignment scope. A Member cannot be granted review rights on some stories and not others. Review is Owner or Admin, full stop.
• No second approver and no sign-off chain. One approval publishes a story, and the person who wrote it may be the one who approves it.
• No per-person activity, workload or throughput view.
• No bulk invite, and no CSV import.