How intermediaries and clients collaborate: share documents, groups and permissions.
After creating a partnership you can collaborate in multiple ways as intermediary and client within the eConnect platform. You can share documents, delegate tasks and review purchase invoices together. This article explains how to set up the collaboration in practice.
Once the partnership is active, you as an intermediary can gain access to your client's organisations. This does not happen automatically: an administrator must first add you as a member to the relevant organisation.
There are two levels of access:
As an intermediary, the "Member" role is usually sufficient. This gives you access to the invoices, orders and other documents of the client organisation without being able to modify the organisation settings.
Within the platform you can share documents with colleagues, clients and partners. Sharing works from three locations: Documents, Inbox IN and Inbox OUT.
When sharing you choose who gets access and what permissions they have:
You can share documents with individual users, groups or entire organisations. This way you determine exactly who sees what.
Groups are a powerful tool for organising collaboration. A group is a collection of users who share access to the same documents.
You can add users from your own environment and from partner environments to the same group. For example, you can create a group "Finance team Client X" containing your own colleagues and the relevant employees of the client.
Groups can also be used as an alternative to the standard permissions model. Instead of making someone a member of an entire organisation, you share specific documents with a group. This way you provide selective access without granting full organisation permissions.
Within a partnership you can designate relationship managers. A relationship manager coordinates the collaboration between the two environments. You can set up multiple relationship managers per partnership.
You connect a relationship manager via Partners > Relationship managers > Connect. The relationship manager role must be assigned separately by an administrator from user management.
Tip: appoint a relationship manager if you manage multiple clients. This provides a dedicated contact point per client relationship who oversees the collaboration.
If you use the Workflow Engine (available as an add-on), you can delegate tasks to users in a partner environment. For example: the intermediary receives the invoice, performs an initial check and delegates the approval task to the client.
The client sees the task in their own environment and can approve, reject or delegate back. All steps are recorded in an audit log.
Accounting firm with 20 clients: the firm has one eConnect environment of its own. Via authorisation requests all clients are linked. Per client there is a partnership. The accountant is a member of the client organisations and can view invoices and manage the software connection. For each client a group has been created containing the accountant and the financially responsible person at the client. Purchase invoices are forwarded to the client for approval via the Workflow Engine. The accountant maintains the overview from a single dashboard.
Want to create a partnership to start collaborating? Read how to link a client.
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