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Managing Users

Updated

Adding users, managing their licenses and email addresses, removing them, and resolving the invitation problems that come up most.

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Planning before you start

Before adding users and importing data, work out where your data currently lives and how your team will be structured, since both decisions affect permissions setup.

Adding a user

Administrators add users from System Settings > Users. Once a user is activated, set up their security access permissions as a separate step.

User List with Add New User Button — The Users panel displays a list of CRM users with their names and email addresses, along with options to manage each account. An “Add New User” button appears in the top right corner, and clicking a user’s name (shown here with “Adele Adkins”) allows administrators to view or edit that user’s profile. Add New User Dialog Box in Insightly — This screenshot shows the “Add New User” modal form in Insightly CRM, which allows administrators to create a new user either by selecting an existing Google Workspace account or by manually entering a first name, last name, and email address. The form also includes fields for assigning the user a Role and a Profile, with “Standard User” set as the default profile selection.
New User Settings and License Configuration — This screen shows the final section of an “Add New User” form in Insightly CRM, where administrators can assign product licenses (CRM, Marketing, and Service subscriptions) and configure personal settings such as time zone, currency, default address country, and preferred language. These settings determine what modules the new user can access and how their account will display regional and localization preferences. Insightly User Setup Process Four-Step Flow — A horizontal arrow diagram illustrates the four sequential steps to set up a user in Insightly CRM: Add User (account access), Set Basic Permissions (admin and export rights), Assign Profile (record-type action access), and Assign Role (individual record access via role hierarchy). This visual helps administrators understand the correct order of tasks when onboarding new users, noting that administrators are not assigned profiles or roles.

Invitation problems

If an invitation expired or never arrived, send a new one from System Settings > Users.

Re-sending a User Invitation in Insightly — The image shows the user management screen with a dropdown menu open, highlighting the “Re-send Invitation” option for a user who has never logged in. This is useful for administrators who need to resend access invitations to users who haven’t yet accepted or received their original invite.
User Invitation URL Option in More Actions — The image shows the More Actions dropdown menu for a user in Insightly’s Users settings, with the “Show Invitation URL” option highlighted. This feature allows administrators to retrieve a direct invitation link for a user who has never logged in, which can be useful if the original invitation email was lost or not received.
Copying an Invitation URL in Insightly — A dialog box displays an Invitation URL that can be shared with a new user, with a right-click context menu open showing the “Copy Link Location” option highlighted. This demonstrates how to copy the invitation link so it can be sent to someone you want to invite to your Insightly account.

If a user receives no notifications, password resets, or invitations at all, the messages are most likely being blocked before delivery rather than not being sent.

Licenses

Removing a user’s license disables their access without requiring you to reassign what they were responsible for, which makes it the right tool for someone temporarily leaving rather than departing. Every user must hold a license to sign in.

Product User Licenses Section in User Details — The User Details page for Kourtney Stuthard shows the Product User Licenses section highlighted, where CRM Subscription, Marketing Subscription, and Service Subscription are checked, while CRM Voice is unchecked. This section is important because it controls which Insightly products a user can access, and administrators need to configure these settings when adding or modifying user accounts.

Deleting a user

Administrators can delete a user outright, or delete and replace them with a new user in one step, which carries over what the departing user was responsible for.

In a plain delete, before the user is removed you are prompted to reassign the records they own or are responsible for to other active users. All standard and custom objects with records the user owns or is responsible for appear as reassignment options. No data is lost. The deleted user still stays associated with records such as completed tasks, emails, or closed projects, appears in the Deleted Users list under System Settings > User List, and shows “(Deleted)” after their name in lists, reports, dashboards, and Details and Related tabs.

If a record is not reassigned during deletion, it keeps the deleted user as its owner. Because a deleted user no longer appears in the filter-by-owner picklist, these records can be harder to locate by owner afterward. This mainly affects records with private visibility: public records remain findable by any user through their field values, and administrators can still surface private ones by building a filter that excludes all current users.

Delete User with Record Reassignment Options — This screen shows the confirmation dialog for deleting a user named Tony Roma in Insightly CRM, warning that the action cannot be undone. It allows administrators to optionally reassign the deleted user’s owned or responsible records—such as Events, Contacts, Opportunities, and Projects—to other active users before finalizing the deletion.

If you have a paid subscription and won’t be adding a new user to replace the deleted one, reduce the number of users on your account to lower your monthly subscription cost.

Changing an email address

Insightly uses the email address as the sign-in ID, so a change of address is a change of user ID. An administrator makes this change. The process differs by account type: for a multiple-user account the administrator uses Change User Email Address on the user’s row. An account owner’s user ID cannot be changed directly, and account ownership must be transferred to another user first. Google Workspace users sign in with their Gmail address, which Insightly cannot change, so those changes go through the Google Workspace administrator or by reassigning the license to a new user.

Reviewing a user’s settings

How you check a user’s permissions depends on whether the account uses Simple or Advanced Permissions.

Insightly CRM User Details Page Overview — The screenshot displays a user profile page in Insightly CRM for a Sales Director named Antoinette Salcedo, showing sections for user details, login history, personal settings, managers in the role hierarchy, and profile permissions. This helps administrators understand the layout and available information when viewing or editing a user’s account.

Why users appear as contacts

Adding a user creates an Insightly contact for them, but system users have special contact records that behave differently from ordinary contacts.

Contact Record for a System User — The image shows an Insightly CRM contact profile page for a user named Aeman Ali, who is designated as a System User, displaying fields for email address, contact owner, and tabs for Details, Related, and Activity. This is relevant for understanding how system users appear within contact records and what information is accessible from their profile.

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