Members vs. Team Members Explained

KamoCRM has two kinds of person, and nearly every permission question depends on which one somebody is.

The distinction

A team member works for your organization. Your staff, your contractors, the people you'd put on an org chart.

A member is a person your organization serves. Depending on your business that's a client, a customer, a patient, a policyholder, a borrower — and if the word "member" doesn't fit, change it (see below).

Both sign in. Both have records. What differs is what they can reach, and what your organization is doing with their information.

Why it matters

Permissions. Roles are assigned to both, but the defaults are different, and some features are only ever for team members. If a role seems to be having no effect, check which kind of person you assigned it to.

Knowledge base audiences. Articles are addressed to members, to team members, or to the public, separately. An article written for staff will not be shown to a customer, and won't be quoted to them by the AI Assistant either.

Billing. How your plan counts people depends on which kind they are. How to Review Your Usage, Storage and Billing shows what's actually being counted.

Profile fields. Some fields — job title, department, extension — belong to the staff record and only exist for team members. Looking for a member's department and not finding one isn't a bug.

The words are yours

If "member" and "team member" don't fit your business, rename them. Say "Client" and "Staff", or "Patient" and "Provider", and the whole product follows — every screen, every label, everywhere.

How to Rename Branches, Members and Team Members, and do it early. Renaming after you've trained everybody means retraining them.

Which one should a new person be?

Ask whether they work for you or are served by you. Almost everybody is obviously one or the other. The genuinely ambiguous cases — an independent agent who sells your product but isn't employed — are usually team members with a limited role, because they need to do work rather than receive service.