# 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 dashboard for one week. Coverage and attendance shows a fill rate, check-call compliance, missed check-calls and a count of scheduled shifts, with a fill-rate chart per site. Below it, hours delivered and a breakdown of form submissions and incidents.](/docs/img/client-portal-dashboard.png)

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

- [How a request becomes a rostered shift](/docs/concepts/how-a-request-becomes-a-rostered-shift)
- [Patterns, seats and ad-hoc shifts](/docs/concepts/patterns-seats-and-ad-hoc-shifts)