With the core of your account set up, you're ready to add your team members to Copper. (If you're a one-person business, you can skip ahead to Import your Data.)

Before you add your team, you'll want to decide what records (People, Companies and Opportunities) each user has access to. That way they arrive in the account with the correct visibility permissions.

Note: These settings apply only to regular-level users. Account Owners and Admins will be able to see all records regardless of the visibility settings.

In this article, we'll tackle the following:

There are two ways to change records and reporting visibility:

Let's look at some common business scenarios to decide which way you'll set visibility.

It's a best practice to only give your team members access to content and tools they truly need. Giving them access to content and tools they don't need can clutter and confuse their workflow. Let's look at some examples of when team members can benefit from visibility restrictions:

You have multiple pipelines running through your account: One for sales, one for business development and one for new employee onboarding.

The Sales Team doesn't help with new employee onboarding, so having access to that pipeline and its associated records just distracts the Sales Team from focusing on closing their deals. You could create a Team in Copper called "Sales," and use team visibility permissions to restrict it from seeing the Business Development and New Employee Onboarding Pipelines, as well as any records associated with those pipelines.

The HR Team is one person. When they add new employees as Contacts in Copper for the New Employee Onboarding pipeline, only they should see those records. In the Visibility field on each new record, they can set each one to be seen by Only Me.

You meet a potential business partner at a conference. You enter them into the system as a Lead so that your Partner Manager can qualify them for the Business Development pipeline. You are an Admin who manages the Sales Team, so you don't need to see what happens outside the Sales Pipeline. You set the lead record Owner as the Partner Manager, and you set the visibility to Record Owner Only. Now only the Partner Manager can see this lead record and convert it into a business opportunity later on.

Before you create record visibility settings in your account, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Are there records that should be restricted?

2. Does more than one person need access to each record?

3. Who should control record visibility in the account?

4. If using Teams, do my teams need restricted access to Copper?

5. If setting unique visibility permissions on each team, do any of the team members need access to content outside their team's visibility settings?

Now that you've answered these questions, you're ready to establish the resulting level of visibility restriction.

In the example below, we can see the Visibility field associated with the Company record. It's currently set to let everyone in the Copper account (Account Owner, Admins and Users) view the record.

If you click the Visibility field, you'll see the other options you have available:

Let's look at what each of these visibility settings means:

Everyone: Every Admin and User in Copper can see this record.

Teams: Everyone in the Team segment selected can see this record. (More on this below).

Individuals: Specific users you select will have access to this record. This setting overrides the Teams visibility permissions.

Only Me: You will be the only person who can see this record.

Record Owner Only: The person who added the record to Copper is the only one who can see it.

Note: These settings apply only to regular-level users. Account Owners and Admins will be able to see all records regardless of the visibility settings.

On any subscription plan, you can segment your users into Teams. On Professional and Business, you can restrict access to records at the Team level. This is helpful if access should align with territories, plan levels or customer business size.

You can create Teams by following the steps below:

1. Sign into Copper and click 'Settings' from the lefthand menu.

2. Scroll down to the Manage Users section, and choose Teams & Visibility Permissions.

3. Click the plus sign that says 'Create New Team.'

4. Enter the Team Name and click 'Save.'

5. Back on the main page, click 'View' in the box that holds your new Team.

6. Under the 'Team Members' in-page tab, click the blue 'Add Team Member' button.

7. In the lightbox that appears, enter the team member's name and choose whether they occupy one of the following roles:

8. Click 'Add' when you're done.

You can activate visibility permissions for Teams by following the steps below:

1. Choose your starting point for this exercise:

2. Read through the 'Activate Team Permissions' lightbox, and choose what happens to the records you already have in your system once visibility permssions are activated.

3. Click 'Activate.'

Now you can set visibility permissions for each Team by following the steps below:

1. Choose your starting point for this exercise:

2. Under 'Entity Type,' you'll see every record and report you can set visibility for. Uncheck the 'Access' checkbox if you don't want this team to have access to a particular type of record or report.

3. Under 'Members of this team can see,' choose the level of visibility this team should have.

4. Every time you choose a new selection under 'Members of this team can see,' your selection is saved automatically.

Congratulations! You've set visibility permissions for each team.

While this is great in a straight-forward use case where each team is restricted from the next, you may have a scenario where you need to override team visibility restrictions. For example, maybe a Sales Rep is transitioning to become a Customer Trainer part-time. This Sales Rep is in a Team for her sales territory, which is restricted from seeing records in other territories. However she needs to train a customer who is in a different territory. The record for that customer can be set to 'Individuals,' and everyone from the territory team plus this Sales Rep can be added to visibility permissions.

In short, the Visibility field at the record level always overrides Team visibility permission setting for that record type.