What are Sub-Accounts?
Sub-Accounts allow you to create sub-users under your main account, which then allows that contact to login and carry out various actions that you, as the main account holder has permitted them to.
Why would you use Sub-Accounts?
Each section of your client has it’s own permission setting so the access rights can be fine-tuned by the main account holder (and any sub-accounts has given permissions to manage contacts) to create different logins for different purposes.
Just a couple of examples where this might be useful are:
- Billing Department – corporate users may have a dedicated billing department who should be given access to pay invoices and place new orders while the web/technical staff would only be given access to view current products & services and submit support requests, which was previously impossible
- Web Developers – a customer hosting with you may be employing a web developer to build and maintain their website so might want to give that developer access to create tickets and correspond on their behalf, without being able to access any billing information or change account details. When it comes to web developers access, we suggest you read about a few things to consider and security principles.
As before there’s also the email preferences for a contact/sub-account so they can be used for having invoice related emails sent to additional email addresses.
How to Create/Modify a Sub-Account
1) To create a sub-account, begin by creating or locating an existing contacts record. This can be done in the client area.
2) Once you are logged in, click on the account name in the top header (right-hand side) then click on Contacts/Sub-Accounts in the sub-menu. As in the screenshot below:
3) On the new page that opens, fill in with the new contact information.
4) If you wish to grant access to the client area and allow the new contact permissions to make changes, check the “Activate Sub-Account” box. After doing this you can assign them a password and grant them the permissions you feel are needed for the user.
The permissions are mostly self-explanatory but some clarifications:
- Change Password – this page can be accessed by all sub-accounts and allows them to change their own login password.
- View & Manage Contacts – this allows access to view & edit all contact users belonging to the master account.
- Manage Domain Settings – this refers to being able to view & change nameservers, locking status, WHOIS information, etc.
- View & Pay Invoices – this includes allowing access to the change credit card details page of the client area.
- Allow Single Signon – tick this option to allow the client to log in to a hosting account’s control panel via Single Sign-On (eg. cPanel).
It is important to note that multiple contacts can have the same email address when being used for email notifications only, but if activating them as a Sub-Account the email address must be unique since it will be used for the login.
Once you’ve made the necessary changes, scroll down the page and click on Save Changes button.
What does the Sub-Account user see?
When the sub-account user logs in, they see exactly the same client area that the main account owner would see, but they can’t view areas that they don’t have permissions to access.
That’s all! Now you know how to add new Contacts/Sub-Accounts to your Cloudean account.
