What a team is
A team is a first-class grouping of members that represents a company or organization sharing your space. It is a distinct concept from the free-text business name, business email, and business phone fields you can set on an individual member profile. Those member fields describe a light affiliation for a solo person. A team is a real record with its own profile, its own billing settings, its own payment method, and its own membership roster.
Each team has a name and an optional set of profile details: a legal name, an email, a phone number, a website, internal notes, and a logo. It also carries a billing address (address lines, city, state, postal code, and country). The logo appears in the team list and on member profiles.
A team belongs to a single workspace, and if your workspace has more than one location you can set a primary location for the team. The primary location drives where the team appears in location-scoped admin views. Admins who are scoped to specific locations only see teams whose primary location is one they can access, plus teams with no primary location set, while admins with workspace-wide access see every team.
You can find teams under the Teams section of the admin area. The list shows each team with its logo, member count, manager names, billing status (whether the team pays or members pay), and active status. The Teams list is available to workspace owners and admins. See Roles and permissions for how those roles are defined.
Adding members and multi-team membership
Membership is tracked in a junction between members and teams, which means a single member can belong to more than one team at the same time. A freelancer who works out of two different company accounts, for example, can be on both. Each membership link is independent, so a person can be a manager of one team while being a plain member of another.
Admins assign a member to a team, with a chosen role, from the member's own profile. The team detail page itself does not add or remove members directly. Its Members tab lists everyone on the team with their role and active status, and notes that membership is managed from each member's profile. When you assign a member to a team they are already on, the existing link is updated rather than duplicated, so the operation is safe to repeat.
Removing a member from a team removes only that one team link by default, which is the common case with multi-team membership. Member deletion flows remove the member from all of their teams at once. Teams are allowed to have zero managers, so there is no guard preventing you from removing the last manager.
The team list and member counts only count members whose profile is still active. A disabled member stays linked to the team but is not counted in the active total.
Team roles
Within a team, each member link has one of two roles: Manager or Member. The role is per team, so the same person can hold different roles on different teams.
A manager has extra abilities on the team they manage, even if they are not a workspace admin. A manager can edit the team's profile and settings, upload the team's logo, and save or replace the team's payment method. Managers also have broader visibility into team activity: they always see every booking made by anyone on the team, regardless of the booking-sharing setting. Plain members do not get these abilities.
Workspace admins can do everything a manager can do on every team, in addition to creating teams, disabling teams, and managing the roster. Disabling a team also disables the manager rights it conferred: a manager of a disabled team no longer gets manager privileges until an admin re-enables the team.
Team billing
Records that can carry a payment in Deskie, such as an assignment, a booking, an invoice, a pass, or an event ticket, have a billing target: either the member or the member's team. Deskie decides which at the moment the record is created, and writes that decision onto the record. This means later changes to a team's settings do not retroactively re-route charges that were already created.
The default-payments-to-team toggle
The master billing control on a team is Default payments to the team. When it is on, in-platform payments by team members attempt the team's stored card first, with each member's own card as the fallback when the team has no card on file. When it is off, the member's own card is the default. An admin can always override this on a specific record.
The automatic routing applies in a specific way. When no explicit override is supplied, Deskie looks at the member's active team memberships. If the member is on exactly one active team and that team has default-payments-to-team turned on, the charge routes to that team. If the member is on no teams, or on two or more teams, the charge bills the member by default, because a multi-team member has no single natural billing target. In the multi-team case an admin must pick the team explicitly to bill it. An explicit override always wins over the toggle, and an explicit choice to bill the member forces member billing even when a team default would otherwise have routed to the team.
The team's payment method
A team has its own payment method, stored against a team-level Stripe customer. The Stripe customer is created lazily, only the first time it is needed, so a team that never uses shared billing never ends up with an empty customer record. Admins and managers of the team can add or replace the card from the team's Billing tab. The card brand, last four digits, and expiry are shown there so you can confirm what is on file. Your workspace must have Stripe connected for this to work. See Connecting Stripe.
The Billing tab also lists invoices that were billed to the team, and the team's overview shows counts of members, managers, open invoices, and upcoming bookings. On the Bookings tab, each booking is tagged as billed to the team or to the member so you can see how each charge was routed. For more on how charges are collected, see Billing cycles and auto-charge and Payments and ACH.
Manager toggles
Beyond the master billing toggle, a team has several settings that admins and the team's managers can edit.
- Don't require members to enter card info. This is a companion to the default-payments-to-team toggle and only takes effect when that toggle is also on. When both are on, new members joining this team skip the credit-card step during onboarding, and their welcome screen lets them know the team is covering their membership. This only applies to members who are on this team alone. A member who belongs to multiple teams is still asked for a card. If you turn the master billing toggle off, this option is reset off automatically, both in the form and on the server, so the relationship between the two settings stays consistent.
- Allow members to book resources. When on, the team's members can create resource bookings. When off, members of the team cannot create resource bookings unless they are a manager of a team. Managers can flip this at any time. For how bookings work generally, see Booking a resource.
- Share bookings across team. When on, team members see each other's bookings in their personal calendar views. When off, members only see their own bookings. Either way, managers and admins always see every booking on the team. This setting defaults to off to preserve privacy.
The team detail page has a Settings tab that displays the current state of the default-payments, allow-members-to-book, and share-bookings toggles as read-only summaries, with a link through to the edit form for anyone who can change them.
Tax-exempt teams
A team can be marked tax exempt. When it is, charges that are billed to this team skip the tax line even if tax is enabled in your workspace settings. This setting is edited from the team's edit form.
Tax exemption follows the actual payer of a charge, mirroring how billing routing works. If a charge is billed to a team, the team's own tax-exempt flag governs whether tax is added. If a charge is billed to a member, the member's own tax-exempt flag governs instead. When neither flag is set or the record cannot be found, Deskie applies tax, erring toward charging it rather than silently skipping it. For the broader picture of how tax is applied, see Tax and card fees.
Importing teams from existing members
If you have been tracking companies informally using the free-text business name on member profiles, Deskie can help you promote those into real teams. The import tool scans your active members and clusters them by their business name, matching case-insensitively and ignoring surrounding whitespace. It surfaces any group where two or more members share the same business name as a candidate. Members with no business name, and single-person matches, are not offered as candidates, since there is nothing to group.
For each candidate cluster you can edit the proposed team name, choose which of the matched members to include, and pick exactly one of the selected members to be the team's manager. Members who are already linked to a team are flagged so you know. Creating the cluster makes a new team and assigns every selected member to it, with the chosen person as manager and the rest as plain members. Because membership is multi-team, a member who is already on another team is added to the new team in addition to any team they are already on, not moved off it. Newly imported teams start with default-payments-to-team off, resource booking allowed, and booking sharing off, which you can adjust afterward from the team's settings.
The import tool is admin-only and is reached from the Teams area. If no clusters of two or more members sharing a business name exist, the tool reports that there are no candidates right now.