People, members and tracked-only
Who can own work, who needs a login, and why those are different questions.
Most tools make “can own work” and “has a login” the same thing, which means you either pay for people who never sign in or leave their work invisible. StatusLoop separates them.
Three things that are easy to confuse
Access, licence and whether someone has a login are three separate settings. They are listed separately below because conflating them is the usual source of confusion — in particular, “Member” is an access level, not a statement about whether someone can sign in.
One roster, two kinds of person
- Has a login
- Signs in and uses a seat. Carries an access level and a licence.
- Tracked-only
- No login, no seat, no cost. Can own projects, tasks and milestones and appears in capacity planning, but never signs in.
Both live in one roster under People, so there is no separate contractor list to keep in step. The distinction is visible in the roster and nowhere else — work owned by a tracked-only person looks the same on a plan as anyone else's.
Who should be tracked-only
- Contractors and agency staff who work in your tools, not ours.
- Executives who only ever read the exported deck.
- Shared specialists from another team whose time you need to show in capacity.
- Anyone you are not sure about — upgrading later is one click, and costs nothing until you do.
Upgrading someone later
Invite them from the roster. The invite matches on email, so the existing person record is reused rather than duplicated — their history, ownership and designation all carry over. This is the reason to put people in as tracked-only early rather than waiting: nothing is lost by doing it now.
Access levels
- Member
- Submits updates, owns and manages tasks, and sees everything in the org. Cannot change org-level settings or invite people.
- Admin
- Everything a member can do, plus invite and remove people, create and delete spaces, triage intake, edit org settings, and change feature modules.
Licences
- Full
- Can create, edit and delete across every module, within whatever their access level allows.
- Viewer
- Read-only. Can see everything in the org and change nothing — not even their own project's update.
- Guest
- Read-only except for submitting status updates. For external collaborators who report in but do not run anything.
Designations and pods
- Designation
- What someone does — engineering, design, product. Used by capacity to show the shape of a team, not just its size.
- Pod
- A cross-functional group focused on an area. A person belongs to at most one. A whole pod can be assigned to a project in one action.
When someone leaves
Deleting a member does not delete the person record or their history. The person survives as tracked-only, so past ownership and progress notes still make sense to anyone reading them later. Their project assignments remain editable like anyone else's.
Seats and cost
Only members count against your plan's member limit, and pending invitations count too — an unaccepted invite is still holding a seat. Tracked-only people are never counted, however many you have.
Was this unclear? Tell us — we would rather fix the page than answer the same question twice.