Hosts and guests

Teralo is built for several companies working on one job, so every project has two kinds of organisation on it. The host owns and configures the project. Guests are the other organisations invited to work on it. Almost every question that starts "why can I see this but not that" has its answer here.

The distinction belongs to the organisation, not to the person. Your company is a host on the projects it runs and a guest on everybody else's, and the same account moves between the two without a second login. A site manager at a subcontractor is a guest on their client's project; the same person's colleague in the office may be a host on their own organisation's projects.

What a host does

The host is the organisation that created the project, usually the main contractor, the developer or the project manager. Hosting means owning the setup, and the things only a host does are all setup.

Deciding which tools the project uses and how each one is configured, from inspection templates to permit types to the contract's cost codes. Writing the permission templates everybody else is assigned. Inviting the guest organisations and the people in them. Building the workflows that route approvals. Authoring reports. Running procurement. Paying for it.

A host also carries the project's own commercial record: the contract sums, the budget, the payments. See Setting up your organisation and The tools catalogue.

What a guest does

A guest takes part. In practice that means lodging things into the host's registers and responding to what comes back, which is a bigger job than it sounds: permits and method statements, safety data sheets, site diary entries, inductions, progress claims and variations, inspections, submittals, observations, correspondence.

A guest can see the project dashboard, the directory, the documents shared with them and the records they are party to. What a guest does not do is approve. Approval is the host's side of the same transaction, and the workflow carrying an item from one to the other is what keeps the two apart. See How approvals work.

Guests also do not see the project's configuration screens, its report authoring, its procurement area or the Payments tab inside a contract. That is by design rather than by permission: those surfaces belong to the organisation running the job.

A guest sees its own rows, not everybody's

This is the part worth being precise about, because it is what people are actually asking when they ask whether a competitor can see their prices.

A guest organisation's view of a register is scoped to that organisation. Your firm's submittals, your firm's permits, your firm's claims. Another subcontractor's rows are not hidden behind a permission you could be granted, and they are not greyed out: they are not in the data the page loads at all. Two subcontractors on the same project, looking at the same register, see two different sets of rows.

What is shared is what is deliberately shared: drawings and specifications the host publishes, correspondence you are a party to, the programme, and the site diary if the host has opened it up.

Permissions sit on top of all this

Being a host or a guest sets the shape of what is possible. What you personally can do inside that shape is set by the permission template assigned to you, a named bundle such as Project Manager, Document Controller, Subcontractor or View Only.

So there are two questions behind any missing feature, and they are worth asking in that order. Is this something guests do at all? If not, no permission will produce it. If it is, does my template include it? If not, the host can change the template, and the change takes effect the next time you open the project. See How permissions work and Permission templates.

One exception is worth knowing. An administrator of the host organisation has full access to the projects their own organisation hosts, without needing a template. On a project hosted by somebody else, that same administrator is an ordinary guest on an ordinary template.

Getting onto a project

Guests do not sign themselves up. The host invites the organisation, and people in it are added from there. If you were expecting access and do not have it, the invitation is the thing to chase. See Inviting people to a project and, if it never arrived, Troubleshooting.

There is no charge to a guest organisation for taking part in somebody else's project. Hosting is what is paid for. See Plans and entitlements.