Once more than one person works on a brand, two questions matter: who can change what, and who's paying for whom.
Three roles
Owner. The person whose account the brand belongs to. Billing, deletion and the destructive things stay here and don't move.
Admin. Can manage the team (invite, remove, change roles) and work in every surface. An active admin can do the manager-level things the owner can, short of billing.
Member. Works in the brand's surfaces. Reads the analysis, uses the tools, contributes to briefs and the calendar. Doesn't manage the team.
Most teams need exactly two of these. Add an admin when you have someone who genuinely runs the account day to day; otherwise members are enough.
Teammates inherit the owner's tier
The rule worth understanding, because it's the one that surprises people:
That's what makes team access straightforward: you're not assembling a team out of individually-subscribed people, you're adding people to a plan.
How seats are counted
Owner plus active members plus invited members must fit the plan's seat allowance.
The pending-invite part catches people out and is deliberate: a pending invite reserves its seat. You can't invite eight people to a five-seat plan and rely on three of them never accepting. If invites are eating your allowance, revoke the stale ones.
Seat allowances vary by tier and are shown on the pricing page: Solo is a single seat, the middle plans a small team, and Agency the largest at the top of the ladder. The allowance is a plan feature, so it's the source of truth rather than anything here.
Inviting someone
Invites are sent by the owner or an active admin. The person accepts and lands in the brand's workspace with the role you gave them.
Two habits worth having:
Invite with the right role first. Changing it later is easy, but people learn the surface with whatever access they started on.
Revoke when someone leaves. Not urgent-feeling and worth doing, both for the seat and for the obvious reason.
Who should own what
Roles govern permissions. They don't govern responsibility, and the second one is what actually makes a shared brand work.
The fields that matter across the product all want one named person, not a role:
- Calendar entries carry an owner: one name, never a team. See using the Content Calendar.
- Creative briefs name a final approver. Projects rarely fail on creative disagreement; they fail because several people gave notes and nobody was empowered to decide between them.
- Review notes should come from one voice, consolidated. An editor handed seven independent opinions has been given your internal disagreement to arbitrate.
Acumin can't enforce any of that, and shouldn't try. But every one of those fields exists because the alternative is a project that stalls politely.
If you don't see team features
Team seats depend on a database migration that may not be applied on every deployment yet. The behaviour when it isn't is deliberate and quiet: the reads return empty and the writes report "not applied", so the app degrades to single-owner behaviour rather than breaking.
If the team surface looks empty and you'd expect it not to, that's the likely reason: it's an operator step, not something wrong with your account.
What doesn't change with roles
Billing is owner-only. Plan changes, payment method, cancellation.
Deleting the brand is owner-only.
Demo brands are read-only for everyone. No role unlocks writes on the showcase account.
How to use this tomorrow
List everyone who currently has access to your brand and ask two questions: does each person still need it, and is anyone an admin who only needs to be a member?
Then check your pending invites. Stale invites holding seats is the most common reason a team hits its limit earlier than expected.
Related: Using the Content Calendar with your team is where roles show up most. Your first 20 minutes in Acumin is what to send a new teammate.