The moment your clinic stops being a one-person account
After finishing the initial clinic setup wizard, your clinic technically exists, but it's just you in it. This article covers the very first time you invite the rest of your team — the receptionists, practitioners, and managers who'll actually run the clinic day to day alongside you.
It's worth being clear up front about scope, because there are two different places in ClinyPal that deal with your staff list, and they're easy to confuse. This article is about the first-time, onboarding-flavored version of inviting people, reached from your Dashboard's onboarding checklist right after setup. The ongoing, everyday way to manage your team — inviting someone new six months from now, editing an existing staff member, deactivating someone who's left — lives in Users & Practitioners: Managing Your Team, and that's the article to come back to once onboarding is behind you.
- Sending your first invite emails and what information each invite needs
- Assigning a role at invite time, and why that choice matters immediately
- What a new teammate sees and does when they open their invite
- Resending an invite that's stuck, unopened, or expired
- Where team management lives once this first-time flow is behind you
Sending your first invitations
From your Dashboard's onboarding checklist, or from Settings > Users & Practitioners directly, choose Invite Staff. Each invitation needs just three things: the person's name, their email address, and the role you want them to hold. You can send invitations one at a time or queue up several before sending, which is the more common approach if you're bringing on a full team at launch rather than one hire at a time.
Nothing about the invited person's account exists until they actually accept — no login, no visible entry on the schedule, nothing a patient could ever encounter. Sending an invite is entirely safe to do speculatively; if someone never accepts, or you change your mind before they do, nothing has been created that needs to be cleaned up.
Choosing a role while you invite, not after
Unlike some systems where you add someone first and sort out their permissions afterward, ClinyPal asks you to choose a role as part of the invitation itself. The role you pick controls what that person's sidebar and Settings access look like from the very first time they sign in — there's no intermediate "unassigned" state where a new staff member has no defined access at all.
| Role | Roughly who this fits | What they'll immediately notice |
|---|---|---|
| Administrator | You, a practice manager, or a co-owner. | Full access — Settings, billing, reports, and every clinical and financial screen. |
| Power Receptionist | A senior front-desk lead who also needs some configuration access. | Full scheduling and patient access plus a meaningful slice of Settings, without full financial administration. |
| Practitioner | Anyone delivering care — doctors, therapists, hygienists, and similar. | Their own schedule, the patients they see, and clinical documentation — no Settings or clinic-wide billing screens. |
| General/front-desk staff | Reception and support staff without configuration responsibilities. | Scheduling and patient-facing tools, with Settings and financial reporting left out of their sidebar. |
Getting this roughly right at invite time matters more than it might seem, because a new hire's first impression of ClinyPal is shaped by whether the tools they need are right where they expect them. It doesn't have to be perfect on the first try, though — role changes are simple to make afterward from Editing a User if you find you picked the wrong one. For the full breakdown of exactly what each role can see and do, see Understanding Your Role & Permissions before you send your invites.
What a new teammate actually sees
Your invited teammate receives an email inviting them to join your clinic by name, with a button to accept. Clicking it takes them to a short screen where they set their own password (they choose it themselves — you never see or set it on their behalf) and, if you've enabled multi-factor login for your clinic, confirm a one-time code the first time they sign in.
Once that's done, they land on their own Dashboard — scoped immediately to the role you assigned, so a Practitioner sees a Practitioner's Dashboard and sidebar from their very first sign-in, not a generic one they'll need to grow into. They don't see the setup wizard you went through; that experience is specific to the account that creates a brand-new clinic, not to staff being added to one that already exists.
When an invite gets stuck
It's common for at least one invite out of a first batch to go unanswered for a few days — people are busy, invitation emails land in spam, or someone simply hasn't gotten to it yet. ClinyPal shows every invitation you've sent with a clear Pending status until it's accepted, so you're never left wondering whether someone joined without checking yourself.
Find the pending invite
Open Settings > Users & Practitioners and look for the person's name with a Pending badge next to it.
Resend it
Select the pending invite and choose Resend Invitation. This sends a fresh invite email and issues a new acceptance link.
Confirm the old link no longer works
Once a new invite has been sent, any earlier invitation email for that same person stops being valid — only the most recently sent one will complete acceptance, so ask them to use the newest email if they had an old one saved.
Where this leads next
This article is deliberately scoped to the first invitations you send while your clinic is brand new. Once your initial team is in place, day-to-day staff management — adding someone new later, editing an existing person's details, deactivating someone who's left, and understanding badges like Owner and Archived on the staff list — is covered in full in Users & Practitioners: Managing Your Team. Bookmark that article; you'll return to it far more often than this one.
That article also covers what to do once someone has actually joined — how to click into their profile to fine-tune their access, set a practitioner's working hours, or register a passkey on their behalf, none of which is part of this first-time invite flow.