Create and Manage User Accounts

Users are members of your organization or team who have access to Help Scout. Account Owners and Administrators can create and manage all aspects of a user account. This article will cover all of the details of user accounts. 

Create Users

Account Owners and Administrators can add new users to your account from Manage > Users.

1

Click the Add User button.

2

• Enter the user's Name and Email Address. 
• Set the user Role. Read more about user roles in User Roles and Permissions.
• Choose which Inboxes the user should have access to.
• Send an invite email? defaults to on. Your user will not be able to log in until you've sent the invite, but you can toggle it off now if you're not quite ready and visit the user profile later to send an invite.
• Click Create User.

Manage Users

Head to Manage > Users to see all active users. Each user shown here counts for your monthly per user billing. 

You may see an alert icon on your user rows, as shown in our example here. You can always hover over the icon you see to get an explanation for that specific user. Below are the alerts that you may see:

• Invite expired: indicates that an invitation was sent to that user but they didn't accept it before it expired. Find the link to Resend invite email from the 3 dot vertical menu or their user profile. 
• Invite email not yet sent: indicates that the user has not yet been invited to Help Scout. Find the link to Send invite email from the 3 dot vertical menu or from their user profile. 
• Too many failed login attempts: indicates that the user has incorrectly entered their password in attempting to log into Help Scout at least ten times. Find the link to Reset password from the 3 dot vertical menu or their user profile. 

User Profile

Below are the details of the options in the left navigation menu after you click into a user row or select Edit role & permissions from the three dot vertical menu. 

Profile

Account Owners and Administrators can manage all of a user's profile information here. This is the same profile data that the user can manage themselves. See Manage Your User Profile for more details on the fields on this page. 

Authentication

Security

Shows the status of two-factor authentication for the user. Set Up Two-Factor Authentication covers the details there. Account Owners and Administrators cannot setup two-factor authentication for users. 

API Keys

On Standard or higher plans, shows the user's Docs API key. See the Docs API documentation for more information on using that key. 

Authorized Apps

If this user has connected any apps or integrations using their credentials, they will show on this screen. Choose Revoke to disable the authentication for that app. 

Active Sessions

Shows all active login sessions for this user along with information about the device and location of their login. Find more information about that here: Session Management.

Permissions

Role

Select the Role from the dropdown menu. See User Roles and Permissions for more information.

Feature Permissions (current Plus and Pro plans only)

Default will set the permissions based on the user's role. Choose Custom to select permissions for only this user. 

Inbox Access

Choose which Inboxes this user has permission to.

Teams

Shows the Teams (available on Plus and Pro plans) this user is a member of. 

Notifications

Check or uncheck notifications for the user to receive. See Manage Help Scout Notifications for more details. 

Auto Bcc

Automatically Bcc any email address on every reply this user sends.

My Apps

Any apps that this user has connected using OAuth and the Help Scout API will show here. This can be 3rd party app integrations or custom applications your team has built. See our Developer documentation for more on what's possible! 

Delete Users

When you delete a user from Help Scout, you don't really have to think about these things, as they don't change:

• All previous replies and notes added to conversations remain in place. 
• Reporting is not affected by the deletion. 
• Workflows and/or tags that were created by that user that aren't specifically taking an action on that user will not be affected.

You do need to think about these things, as they will change: 

• Conversations assigned to the user will automatically be set to Unassigned. This may take several minutes to complete.
• To assign conversations from the deleted user to another Help Scout user, run a Workflow to re-assign those before you delete the user. There is no way to do this after the user has been deleted. See Get Started With Workflows for help with Workflows. 
• Any App IDs in that user's My Apps will be also be deleted. If you have built custom development that uses this user's App IDs to connect to Help Scout, it will stop working when the user is deleted. Reach out to your developers to change the authentication to a different user to avoid interruption of your custom development.  
• Workflows that include an action on that user — for example, assigning conversations to that user — will become inactive. After you've deleted the user if any of those remain, when you visit the Workflows list you will see an error that says "This workflow references a user that has been deleted"

Steps to Delete a User

1

Head to Manage > Users and click on the User you'd like to delete.

2

Click on the Delete user link located at the bottom of the page.

3

Select a reason for deleting the User and click the Delete User button to confirm. 

Restore a Deleted User

If you deleted a user in error or you just had a change of plans, have an Administrator or your Account Owner reach out to our team with the user details and we will restore the user account for you.

Creating a new user with the same name and email address does not restore the user. 

Change User Passwords

Administrators in Help Scout are unable to manually reset user passwords. You can send a password reset email from Manage > Users. Click the user row, then click the Reset password link at the bottom of the page.

Common Questions

Can I deactivate a User temporarily if they will be out for a while?

There isn't a way to deactivate a user temporarily, but if you have team member who will be away for over a month, delete the user normally and send us a message when they need to be reactivated.

My user is getting an error when trying to accept the invite or trying to reset their password. What can I do?

The invite and password links in those emails are only valid for a limited time for security purposes. If the time out period has passed, coordinate with the user to let them know you're doing this, and just head back to Manage > Users and choose that user. You'll choose  Re-send invite email for new users or Reset password for existing users. 

For password resets, you can have the user generate it themselves as well by heading to the Recover your Help Scout password page.