User profile management

Your own profile

Settings → Profile, or Your Profile from the menu under your name in the top right, holds your account information: your name, your email address and your profile photo. That menu also shows your own role in the firm, beside your email address.

Two of those are worth a second’s thought:

• Your name is what clients see on messages and on the documents you upload. Use the name they would recognise.
• Your email address is where password resets go, and it is shown here but locked — the screenshot below is what that looks like. Nobody can change it, an admin included; see Setting up your Pertavo account.

The profile photo

A photograph is a small thing that does real work in a portal where clients are looking at a list of names and wondering who is dealing with their affairs. It is worth two minutes.

Managing other people

An admin manages the firm’s accounts from Users: inviting people, changing a role, and deactivating somebody who has left.

The member panel

Click anybody’s row in Users and a panel opens on them. It holds what the table has no room for:

• Their phone number, when they joined, and when they last signed in.
• Their role in this firm — which the table does not show, so this is the place to check whether somebody is an attorney or an admin.
• The matters they are on, and how many documents and invoices sit against them.
• The invitation they arrived through, if they came in through one.

The three actions live at the bottom of the same panel: change their role, deactivate or reactivate them, and resend an invitation that was never accepted. Which of those you may use depends on your own role — see Changing somebody’s role.

Two details that save a round of messages:

• The panel is staff only. A client who finds the address is refused, not shown a thinner version of it. It has colleagues’ telephone numbers in it.
• The address bar follows the panel. Opening somebody adds them to the URL, so you can paste that link to a colleague and it opens on the same person. The back button closes the panel rather than leaving the page.

With ethical walls switched on, the matters list shows the matters you may open, not everything the person is on, and the panel says so where that applies. Otherwise “no matters” and “no matters you are allowed to see” would look identical.

Deactivating

Deactivating an account stops that person signing in. It does not delete what they uploaded — documents belong to the firm, not to the person who happened to put them there. That is what you want when somebody leaves mid-season.

You cannot deactivate your own account, and the button reads Activate for somebody already switched off.

When somebody leaves the firm

In order: deactivate the account from Users, reassign their open work to whoever is picking it up, and tell the clients who were dealing with them. The first step is the urgent one; an account nobody uses but everybody can still sign into is exactly the account that gets used.

What you cannot change about yourself

Your role, your email address, and your own active status. All three are deliberate.

Ask an admin for a role change — or an owner, if the role you need is owner or admin, because an admin cannot hand those out. See Understanding user roles and permissions.