One email starts it. A checklist finishes it.
Onboarding a client is one modal, one field, and a handful of statuses to watch. What actually takes the work is everything between “they signed up” and “they can act on their own account”. This page walks the whole path: sending the invite, reading the lifecycle honestly, seeing what the client sees on their own first run, and knowing exactly which steps you can finish and which ones only the client can close.
Five moments, not one event.
“Invite sent” and “client is live” are separated by a sign-up, an auto-attach, and a sync period the dashboard tracks for you. None of it needs you to refresh manually, but all of it is worth reading before your first invite.
Sending the invite.
The whole flow lives on Overview. There is exactly one action button and exactly one field to fill in.
Open Invite client
Enter the client's email
Send it
Watch it move
Invitation states.
Five statuses cover the whole life of an invitation, from the moment you send it to the moment it either lands or lapses.
Most invitations move through these states without you doing anything. Where you actually intervene is at the ends of the path: resending after “Expired” or “Failed”, and checking in on an “Active” client whose management access has not cleared yet.
When something goes wrong.
Six messages cover every way Send invitation email can fail. Each one tells you where to look first.
Three of these six are yours to fix directly: a typo, a duplicate send, or sending faster than the rate limit allows. Two point back at the client’s own account state. The last is the only one worth escalating rather than retrying repeatedly.
What the client sees.
Once a client is in, Actionist runs its own onboarding: the Agent Onboarding studio. Knowing this flow means you can talk them through it, or pick up from wherever they stopped. Some clients finish it before you ever touch their workspace. Others hand it to you half-answered and expect you to carry on from Company Overview.
Before they even open it
Before they even open it
Workspace provisioning
Workspace provisioning
Company Overview
Company Overview
Each agent, in five parts
Each agent, in five parts
- Agent Instructions. Identity, remit and team from the accepted proposal.
- Skills. Manual tasks, schedules and triggers.
- Channels. Where this agent talks to the client’s team.
- Advanced. Delegation, access control and approval mode.
- Apps. Connecting the tools this agent uses.
Confirming an agent
Confirming an agent
The handoff checklist.
Almost everything in a new client’s workspace is yours to prepare. One category never is: whatever needs the client’s own credentials or authorization. That control is disabled for any active delegated session, whatever scopes the client granted you, with the tooltip “Client action required”: “This app requires the client’s credentials or authorization to complete installation. Ask the client to install or connect this app directly.” Build your onboarding around that boundary instead of running into it mid-setup.
A six-step onboarding checklist.
Agree goals
Prepare the workspace
Build the agents
Request the connections
Test
None of these six steps require anything you can’t do inside a delegated session, except the one that was never yours to do in the first place. Plan the connection request early, not as an afterthought once everything else is built.
Keeping clients separate.
Onboarding rarely happens for one client at a time. The habit that keeps their data from bleeding into each other is small: leave sessions the right way.
Exit a delegated session with the Exit button or the Escape key rather than navigating away or closing the tab. That is what clears the cached workspace data before you open the next client. Full detail on entering, reading the banner, and leaving cleanly lives on View as client.
This matters most in the middle of an onboarding run, when you’re moving between two or three new clients in the same afternoon. Skipping the exit step is how one client’s workspace data ends up lingering in view while you’re meant to be looking at the next one.
A realistic first week.
Three shapes an onboarding tends to take, depending on how ready the client is to hand over their own logins. None of these are guarantees, just patterns worth recognizing early so you can plan the week around them.
Send the invite, run the checklist.
Everything up to the credentials boundary is yours to prepare. Everything past it is one clear ask.
One field to invite a client. No day count to promise, no credential you can ever see.
Read the status · watch the attention rail · hand the connection back when it’s the client’s to finish.