Learn the differences between roles to choose the right access for your team.

There are 2 workspace-level roles:

Inviting your teammate to your Workspace ensures they are added to the Workspace team, have the Workspace settings applied for their account, and can use your SignNow subscription to send out invites.

Go to Admin Settings at the bottom left side of your account → click on the Workspace Members option to invite a new teammate.

Hit the Invite Members button to invite collaborators.

You can assign the role (Admin or Member) to every teammate in bulk or individually.

The invitee will receive an email notification inviting them to the Workspace. They must log into their SignNow account to accept the invite.

Until the teammate accepts the Workspace invite, they will be listed in the Pending Invites section. You can either cancel or resend their invite.

You can change the teammate's role at a later time, not during an invite.

You can remove a teammate from your Subscription and Workspace. The same menu also lets you view a member’s activity, move them to another workspace, or ban them.

Custom roles let you define the levels in between the Admin and Member roles. You give the role a name and choose, area by area, what it can do — so a role can match a real job in your organization rather than a preset.

The second half of this article is a set of ready recipes by job title. Find the one closest to your team and copy the settings.

Before you've created anything, Roles and Permissions lists your two default roles and offers two ways to start — Create role, or Add from workspace if you've already built roles elsewhere.

Once you have roles, each one is listed under Custom roles with the number of people holding it, an Edit button and a … menu.

Every role is built from four blocks.

Full admin access covers: workspace settings · managing workspace members (view, move, invite, remove) · setting up custom roles · branding · payment services · compliance settings · cloud storages · SSO · workspace analytics.

Under Full admin access there's one extra, optional checkbox:

This checkbox is available only with Full admin access.

Levels are cumulative: Edit includes Send, and Send includes View.

Every role, custom or not, can create documents, send document invites, and create templates in their own personal space. This section is shown in the drawer but can't be changed. Custom roles govern the shared workspace; a person's own space stays their own.

In the product, that's the difference between My Documents and My Templates at the top of the left menu, and the TEAM section below it.

Here are all four blocks together in the Create role drawer.

The quickest way to understand the blocks is to open Admin and Member with the View button and see which options each one has selected. They're a useful starting point for your own roles.

A Custom role created confirmation appears, and SignNow asks whether you'd like to assign the role right away — to existing members, or to people you're about to invite.

Naming rules. Role names are unique within the workspace, compared case-insensitively, and the built-in names (Admin, Member) are reserved in every language SignNow supports. Each workspace also has a maximum number of custom roles; once you reach it, reuse or remove a role to add a new one.

Three ways, depending on where you are.

When inviting someone new — Admin Settings → Workspace Members → Invite Members. Choose the custom role in Assigned roles, individually or for the whole batch. The role travels with the invite: when the person accepts, they arrive with it already applied.

For someone already in the workspace — Admin Settings → Workspace Members → click the role on their row → pick the custom role. Select several people first to change them all at once.

Right after creating the role — use the Assign this role modal that appears, which takes you straight to either flow.

Role changes take effect without the person logging out and back in, and they're notified when their access changes.

In the members list, filter by All custom roles. To see who holds one specific role, open the … menu next to it on the Roles and Permissions page and choose View people.

Each custom role on Admin Settings → Roles and Permissions has an Edit button and a … menu.

Edit opens the role in the same drawer you created it in. Change the name, description or any permission and save — everyone holding the role picks up the change straight away, without logging out and back in.

The … menu holds the rest:

Default roles (Admin, Member) have a View button instead, which shows their permissions read-only; they aren't editable.

Every create, edit, assign and delete is recorded with who did it and when, so role changes stay traceable.

If you run a workspace per department, per facility or per client, you can build a role once and reuse it. There are three ways, for three different moments:

Good to know. Copies are independent from the moment they're made — editing the role in one workspace doesn't change the copy in another. And duplicating a role definition doesn't assign it to anyone; assignment stays per workspace.

"I set up the workspace and manage the people in it. I don't need to see what the team signs."

Who this fits. IT, systems or operations administrators who configure SSO, branding and compliance settings and handle who's in the workspace. Many organizations prefer to keep workspace administration separate from access to the documents themselves, often because their compliance policy asks for that separation.

The role.

What they can do. Every administrative job — invites, workspace settings, branding, SSO, compliance settings, even creating more custom roles.

Good to know. Admin-level reports and member-document search follow this same permission, so they're part of what this role leaves out. Keep at least one role in the workspace with the checkbox on — see HR or office manager.

"I send our standard paperwork all day. I'm not the one who decides what's in it."

Who this fits. Anyone who works from the team's prepared templates — sending contracts, offers, intake forms — while a smaller group maintains the templates themselves. Keeping the fields consistent matters for the reports and exports built on those templates, so a clear split between the two groups is worth setting up.

The role. Name it something the team will recognize, like Template sender.

What they can do. Send documents from the team's templates and manage those invites. They work from what the team space already contains, and the shared templates stay as the owners set them up.

The companion role. Give the people who maintain the templates the same role with Edit instead — name it Template creator. Edit is also what lets colleagues co-edit team templates together, so it's the level to use when a template has more than one owner.

Good to know. Everyone can still create and send documents from their own personal space — that part is standard for all roles. What the Send level defines is how the person works with the team's shared content.

"I need a new person on my team next week — but I'm not the one who runs the workspace."

Who this fits. Department heads, squad leads and managers who need to bring people in, while workspace setup and structure stay with your admins.

The role.

What they can do. Send an invite request for a new teammate, which an admin approves or denies. Workspace settings, branding and SSO stay with the admins, and workspace structure stays where your admins planned it.

Variations. For people who shouldn't send invite requests either, use No admin access. Leaving Create workspaces off is worth doing across all your roles when you want the set of workspaces to stay deliberate and visible to your admins.

Good to know. The Create workspaces check applies to the workspace the person is currently in. If someone holds a role with that permission in another workspace, they can still create from there.

"I need to look at the team's paperwork. I'm not here to send anything."

Who this fits. Two groups with the same needs: reviewers who inspect but don't act (audit, security, legal), and temporary people — contractors, seasonal staff, agency partners — who need the team's documents to do their job and nothing beyond that.

The role. Name it for the group: Compliance reviewer or External contributor.

What they can do. Open, download and copy team documents, and view template info. No invites, no settings, no workspace creation. Move them to Send if they also need to send from your templates.

Good to know. If a reviewer also needs visibility into individual members' personal documents, that's the View member documents checkbox, which is available only together with Full admin access. Decide which side of that trade-off your review process needs.

Tip for contractors. Decide up front who takes ownership of their documents when the engagement ends — see the next recipe.

"Someone left last Friday. Their agreements are still under their name."

Who this fits. Whoever handles offboarding and internal moves — HR, an office manager, or an ops admin — and needs to hand a departing colleague's documents to someone still on the team.

The role. Name it Offboarding admin.

What they can do. Open a member's documents and transfer ownership to another person, so in-progress agreements keep moving when someone changes team or leaves.

Good to know. This is the permission that gives access to other people's documents, so it's worth keeping to a small number of roles — some teams assign it to a person only for the period they need it. Just make sure at least one role in the workspace has it, so ownership transfers stay self-serve.