Organisation, agency, client — who is who
An organisation runs the rota and raises requests when it wants agency cover. An agency proposes its own officers against the requests shared with it. A client is the company a site is billed to, and can be given a login to a portal of its own. One shift can involve all three.
Who does what?
| Party | What they do | What they see |
|---|---|---|
| Organisation | Rosters its own sites, and raises a request when it wants an agency to cover a shift | Its dashboard, requests, roster, patterns, timesheets, employees, sites, reports, forms and audit trail. Its Admin and Manager roles additionally see Agencies, Clients and Invoices. |
| Agency | Proposes its own officers against the requests shared with it, and rosters those officers | Its dashboard, the requests shared with its agency, its own roster and officers, agency reports, forms, audit trail and agency settings. Not the organisation's employees, patterns or other agencies. |
| Client | Is billed for the cover delivered at the sites linked to it | A separate portal with three screens: a dashboard of coverage, hours delivered and incidents across its sites, its invoices, and its own profile. Nothing else in the platform is reachable from it. |

The client portal is walled off in both directions. A signed-in client is redirected back to its own dashboard from any other page, and the only APIs it can call are the portal's own, plus sign-in and notifications.
Can a client actually sign in?
Yes. An organisation's Admin or Manager creates the client, then creates a login for it from that client's record. There is no separate switch to turn the portal on — creating the login is what gives the client access, and signing in with it lands on the client dashboard.
The client sees invoices only once they have been issued. A draft invoice is not shown in the portal.
Why do sites belong to different owners?
Every site is a row in one table, and each row records who owns it: an organisation or an agency.
- An organisation's sites are the places it rosters cover for. Its patterns, shifts and requests hang off them.
- An agency's sites are the places it works at under its own arrangements — the ones set up for organisations that do not use ShiftTracker themselves. An agency's roster covers both kinds: shifts at organisation sites it has been given work at, and shifts at its own.
A site can also name a client. That link is what makes billing possible: an invoice is raised for one client, and its lines come from the charges on shifts at that client's sites over the chosen period.
Related
Last updated 2026-08-12