A Viewer sees only the projects that have been shared with them, and nothing else in your organization. On those projects they can read the plan, including who is booked and when, but they never see any money and cannot change anything. Viewers are free and take no paid seat.

Who the Viewer role is for

Pondria has four roles: Owner, Manager, Member and Viewer. Viewer is the read-only role for clients and other outside stakeholders who want to follow the work without waiting for spreadsheet exports. A Viewer is never counted on your bill, so sharing a project with a client costs nothing. The paid roles are listed under pricing.

Someone can also be moved to the Viewer role when billing is not set up in time. Their Overview then says "Your role has been downgraded to Viewer", and how the trial, grace period and billing work explains what happens next.

Inviting a Viewer

Only an Owner can invite someone as a Viewer, and every Viewer invitation names the projects they will see.

Open Settings and go to Members & access.
Choose Invite member, enter the email address and set the Role to Viewer.
Under Projects, pick at least one project.
Choose Send invitation.

Pondria emails the invitation, and someone new to Pondria finishes setting up their account from the link in that email. Once they accept, they can see the projects you picked and nothing else in your organization. Because a Viewer is always invited to specific projects, your organization needs at least one project before you can invite one.

Sharing more projects later

After a Viewer has joined, you share further projects from the project itself. Open the project, choose Settings, then Project access, and use Add viewer… on the Viewers card. An Owner can do this on any project, and a Manager on the projects of the teams they manage. Only people who already hold the Viewer role can be added there.

An Owner can check what each Viewer can reach in Settings, under Members & access. Viewers have their own section in the member list, and the eye button on a Viewer's row lists their Shared projects. From there, View as shows you what that Viewer can see, in read-only mode.

What a Viewer sees

A Viewer's sidebar holds two pages, Overview and Projects. Their Overview is headed Shared with you and lists Your projects, and the Projects page lists them too, showing open projects by default. Any other page in your organization, opened from a link, shows "Not available to viewers" with a button back to their projects.

On a project that has been shared with them, a Viewer can read:

the project name, status, client, dates and description
the Scheduled hours and how many people are booked
the Staffing section, with each booked person's name, role, dates and hours per day
the project notes and the Comments thread

Names in the Staffing section are plain text. A Viewer cannot open a person's page, and cannot see anyone's other bookings, capacity, time off or logged hours. They cannot edit the project, book people or open its settings.

A Viewer can read the Comments on a shared project, but cannot write, reply or be @mentioned. When a teammate types an @mention, Viewers appear as View-only.

Viewers never see money

A Viewer never sees a financial figure, whatever your organization's Financial visibility settings say. On a shared project they see no win probability, no revenue or price, no pricing model, no billable rates, and no cost or margin. Those settings, which only an Owner can change, decide how much Members see and never extend to Viewers.

To learn how those figures work for your own team, see how a win probability flows into capacity and revenue and why the forecast shows three numbers.

Removing access

To stop sharing one project, open it, choose Settings, then Project access, and remove the Viewer from the Viewers card.
To take someone out of your organization, an Owner removes them from the member list in Settings, under Members & access. They lose access straight away.
Changing a Viewer's role to Member, Manager or Owner removes their project grants. Those roles take a paid seat.

For an overview of every documentation page, go back to the documentation home.