How to transfer a user account with the same email address

NigelS

We have a business account. One of our staff had a pre-existing paid licence using her work email address. She is using this account to access our Smartsheet resources; she is not set up as a user under our business account, we have added her personal paid account to our user groups which are shared to sheets and dashboards etc. We would like to clean this up by asking our staff member to delete her personal account and then create an account with the same work email address under the business account.

I am not sure what the implications of this are and am reluctant to proceed until I know exactly what will happen. If she deletes her personal account, will we be able to create a user for her under our business account straight away, or will there will be a delay of some weeks until her account and data are fully deleted? We would like to be able to do this without a delay so that there is no interruption to her access to Smartsheet projects.

I would be grateful for any advice on how to best do this.

kowal

hi @NigelS,

if the person already have paid account associated to here business email (gov) all you have to to add an Alternate email to her/his t account once it's added and approved you can set it up as primary email and the business account will be released and can be added in your organization.

Kerry St. Thomas

I recommend against deleting the account. Since it's the same email address it'll wreak all kinds of havoc. Anything she created may be at risk if it doesn't get pulled into your business account first; any sharing or permissions might get… wonky.

Instead, I suggest you work with your IT team. Create an alternate email address for this staff person - and then add that alternate email to your business account. So for a bit, she'll have TWO accounts.

Once you do that, a Smartsheet Admin can merge accounts - the admin can also identify which one is the primary email. You can then either leave the secondary email there, or delete it.

This is a bit convoluted, but I think it'll be more stable and will be less of an interruption for your staff. Good luck!

NigelS

Thanks very much for your response, I appreciate it. We work for a government department and unfortunately policies are not flexible enough for our IT support to create a second email address for the staff member. All of the Smartsheet content is located in our business account, she has nothing in her personal (Pro) account that she wants to keep so we are not concerned about the deletion of her account. The primary issue is whether we can create a new account straight away with the same email address under our business account after deleting her personal account so that she maintains access to our projects. I did find this article Free up an email address | Smartsheet Learning Center which suggests changing the primary email address of her personal Pro account, but it stipulates that the email address to change to must be on the same domain as the existing one, so that solution is not possible for us either given that we can't create a second work email address for her. If you have any further thoughts they would be welcome.

kowal

hi @NigelS,

if the person already have paid account associated to here business email (gov) all you have to to add an Alternate email to her/his t account once it's added and approved you can set it up as primary email and the business account will be released and can be added in your organization.

NigelS

Thanks Tomasz, that sounds like it should work. We'll give it a go.