Pipeline
Every “also let these people see it” feature is a second access system.
And a second access system is how records leak. Two code paths decide who can see a deal, they disagree in one edge case, and nobody finds out until a customer asks why their competitor's name was visible to a contractor.
The alternative is boring and correct: reuse the one that already exists.
One path
Adding somebody writes an ordinary share. Nothing else changed.
A solutions engineer on the migration question, a legal reviewer on the terms, a partner manager on the reseller relationship — each added to the deal, each gaining access through the platform's normal record sharing.
The visibility rules did not need modifying to support this, which is the whole argument. There is no second way into a deal, so there is no second way in to get wrong.
- R. EllisOwnerowns the record
- Dr Amara OkaforSolutions — migrationadded to the deal
- S. IyerLegal reviewadded to the deal
- Their role is free text —
Because the useful answer is "solutions engineer covering the migration question", not an option from a list somebody chose eighteen months ago.
- Adding the same person twice is refused —
By name, rather than quietly creating a second row.
- Somebody from outside the workspace is refused —
Checked before anything is written.
- One thing to know about removing —
Removing a collaborator revokes the matching share. If an administrator had separately granted that person access to the same deal, that grant goes too — so re-grant it if it was there for a different reason.
What this is not
Collaborators are access, not credit.
Being on a deal does not split its commission. Payout splitting is a property of the commission plan — it can attribute across deal team roles, and it is configured there rather than implied by who was added here.
And there is no equivalent on an account. A deal can have collaborators; an account's access is ownership, team and explicit sharing.
- A named role, not a permission level —
Which is what makes the list readable a month later. "Legal review" and "solutions — migration" tell the next person why these two are here; a list of names and access levels does not.
- Ownership is unchanged —
Adding people does not dilute who the deal belongs to. The owner is still the owner for routing, for the forecast, for the quota and for the commission — collaborators are access and nothing else.
- It composes with everything else —
A collaborator's access sits alongside ownership, team scope and any workspace-wide openness. Nothing overrides anything — the answer is whether any of them says yes.
›Can a collaborator edit the deal?
They gain read access through the share. Editing follows the same write rules as everything else — ownership, team scope, or an explicit read-and-write grant.
›Does a collaborator see the account and its other deals?
Only what they could see anyway. The share is on this deal.
›Is there an account team?
No. It is the most common follow-up question here and the answer is no — the tables were planned and never built.