What are groups?
Groups let you bundle team members together, for example your support staff, paraplanners, or mortgage administrators, and grant that whole group access to an adviser's clients in one go, rather than sharing clients one by one.
How access works
Managers and account owners sit above the group structure entirely: they see all firm clients by default, regardless of groups.
Groups apply to advisers and below (advisers, paraplanners, mortgage administrators, support staff, and so on).
Once groups are in use, clients are private by default. A user can only see the clients their group structure gives them access to.
Turning on private-by-default access
Before groups will actually restrict anything, there's a company-level setting that needs to be switched on. A manager or account owner can toggle this by going to Settings → Company settings, where there's an option to mark all clients as private by default.
This is a prerequisite, not optional: if you're using groups to control who can see which clients, this toggle needs to be on, otherwise clients aren't private by default and the group structure has nothing to restrict, everyone can still see everything regardless of how groups are set up.
Once it's switched on:
Clients are private by default
Access is then governed entirely by group membership (and any one-off "Advised by" additions)
Managers and account owners still see everything, as they sit above the group structure regardless
Where to find groups
Go to Settings → Team. You'll see two tabs:
Members - add and manage individual team members, and see each person's role (adviser, manager, support, and so on).
Groups - create and manage groups.
Create a group
On the Groups tab, click Create group.
Give the group a name, for example "Paraplanners" or "Mortgage administrators."
Use Search members to add to select who belongs to the group. This can be a whole team, or just one person if you want a one-to-one structure.
Click Next.
On the Grant access screen, select the adviser(s) whose clients this group should be able to see. This is user-scoped: granting access to an adviser gives the group all of that adviser's clients by default, not a hand-picked selection.
Click Save.
Your group now appears on the Groups tab, showing its member count. Every member of the group can now see the relevant advisers' clients, with no need to share clients one by one.
The group mechanism isn't limited to support staff or paraplanners. Since groups apply to "advisers and below," an adviser can just as easily be the member of a group, not just the person whose clients are being shared.
So if you wanted Adviser B to have full, standing access to Adviser A's entire client bank (not just one client), you'd:
Create a group (e.g. "Adviser A cover" or similar)
Add Adviser B as the group member
On the Grant access step, select Adviser A
Because it's user-scoped, Adviser B now sees Adviser A's whole client bank by default, the same as if they were a member of a support/paraplanning group; the system doesn't distinguish by role for this purpose, just by who's in the group and whose clients they've been granted access to.
Giving one-off access to a single client
Groups are user-scoped, but sometimes you need to share just one client, for example covering for an adviser who's away. For that, use the Advised by field on the client itself:
Open the client record.
Next to Advised by, click the +.
Select the person providing cover.
This is client-scoped: it gives that person access to this one client only, without affecting their access anywhere else.
Good to know
Think of it as two levels: groups are user-scoped (a whole group gets an adviser's entire client base), while Advised by is client-scoped (one person gets one client).
Managers and account owners always see all firm clients, regardless of group setup.
Groups are the quickest way to manage access for multiple people at once. Set it up once per group instead of repeating the same sharing steps for every client.