Help Needed: Allow Employees to Edit Sheets Without Paid Licenses

Hi everyone,

I have a Business Smartsheet account, and I recently noticed that all my employees are now listed as “Viewers” in Seat Management. As a result, they cannot edit their tasks, even though the sheets themselves grant them edit permissions.

My goal is for them to use Smartsheet without paid licenses—essentially as free users—but still have editing access where allowed by the sheet. Right now, no one can work, so I need urgent guidance on how to fix this for all employees.

I came across a setting that says:

“Provisional Members will be automatically downgraded to free Viewers (internal) or Guests (external) at the end of the current billing cycle. You can upgrade users to paid Members at any time.”

Does this mean that each free user who creates an account will automatically be downgraded to a viewer at the end of the billing cycle? And will only be able to have access with a paid user license?

Any guidance on how to restore proper access without assigning paid licenses would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

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Accepted answers

Andrée Starå

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/144931/help-needed-allow-employees-to-edit-sheets-without-paid-licenses

Hi,

I hope you're well and safe!

There's no way to give Free users editing capabilities anymore, but there are some workarounds that could work.

1️⃣ Update Requests

2️⃣ Forms

3️⃣ Premium App, Dynamic View

Would that work/help?

I hope that helps!

Be safe, and have a fantastic day!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Smartsheet Expert Consultant & Partner / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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SueinSpain

So we faced tis exact issue and there are 2 ways to overcome.

allow them to update through automated email update requests as they can open these requests and update the fields even as a user. Don't even need to be shared on the smartsheet as long as the permissions are set correctly in automations.
Large scale we bought dynamic view at a fixed fee (not sure if this is still available) and so nobody, other than licenced users, is shared on a smartsheet. Dynamic view allows you to restrict what rows they see, what fields they see and furthermore what fields they can update - brilliant. as this has stopped people updating fields they should. It also allows them to write filters in dynamic view and, if you grant the permission, to download data. Where the smartsheet export downloads all records regardless, the dynamic view download just downloads any filtered records that you might want.
If you want to be really snaeky, and I'm sure they'd catch on, we have 2 email addresses, the company I work for and our parent company. I could have used all our parent company addresses as then they would be "guestd" but I'm sure this loophole will be closed shortly and isn't really fair - so wouldn't recommend it

All comments

Marlana K.

Here are a couple of articles that will help explain the Seat Type and Permissions.

https://help.smartsheet.com/learning-track/viewers-and-guests/seat-types-and-permissions

https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2483245-User-Subscription-Model-System-Admin-overview

An.L

Thank you for your response.

Unfortunately, this still does not address my main question. My goal is to allow users with free “Viewer” seats to still edit sheets where they have permissions (which they currently have), without assigning paid licenses.

Andrée Starå

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/144931/help-needed-allow-employees-to-edit-sheets-without-paid-licenses

Hi,

I hope you're well and safe!

There's no way to give Free users editing capabilities anymore, but there are some workarounds that could work.

1️⃣ Update Requests

2️⃣ Forms

3️⃣ Premium App, Dynamic View

Would that work/help?

I hope that helps!

Be safe, and have a fantastic day!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Smartsheet Expert Consultant & Partner / CEO @ WORK BOLD

Paul Newcome

@An.L The only way to allow internal users free editing access is to leverage forms, update requests, or the premium add-on Dynamic View. You can also publish the sheet as editable by anyone and share the published link to users. To edit a sheet directly, they will need to be a paid member.

TAS Safety

Yeah unfortunately this was a really rough update that Smartsheet tried to sell as a good one. I don’t see the value in purchasing licenses or additional premium add ons for users who might go into a sheet once a week or even once a month just to update a task or change one field. These users aren’t creating anything. They’re simply making small updates.

Update Requests don’t work in all scenarios so they’re not a true replacement. Since our subscription shifted to this model it’s honestly been a struggle to find clean workarounds. I’m currently building a solution but it’s far more complicated than it should be. It would be much easier for the end user to update the sheet directly than to force them through a long form.

It’s frustrating but it is what it is for now. Hopefully Smartsheet revisits this or at least allows free users with proper permissions a limited number of edits. I would absolutely take that as a compromise.

tim.wimmer49936

This is why my company is migrating away from Smartsheet as well as some of our business partners. We had one user who did nothing but open a sheet once a month and use a filter to look up data. No editing or entry of data, just changing the criteria in a filter. They consider that editing and requiring a paid seat now.

Erin Demse

How does one use Dynamic View to get around the edit = seat requirement?

gb82

Its bizarre since 'guest' users ie. with a different email domain to the business account users - can have editing access. So if you share the sheet to users using a different email address that is not readily identifiable as associated with the business account, they can still edit ;-)

gb82

Massive own-goal on the part of Smartsheet I bet they lost a lot of users, also the inability to implement MFA (however this is now - eventually - being addressed).

SueinSpain

So we faced tis exact issue and there are 2 ways to overcome.

allow them to update through automated email update requests as they can open these requests and update the fields even as a user. Don't even need to be shared on the smartsheet as long as the permissions are set correctly in automations.
Large scale we bought dynamic view at a fixed fee (not sure if this is still available) and so nobody, other than licenced users, is shared on a smartsheet. Dynamic view allows you to restrict what rows they see, what fields they see and furthermore what fields they can update - brilliant. as this has stopped people updating fields they should. It also allows them to write filters in dynamic view and, if you grant the permission, to download data. Where the smartsheet export downloads all records regardless, the dynamic view download just downloads any filtered records that you might want.
If you want to be really snaeky, and I'm sure they'd catch on, we have 2 email addresses, the company I work for and our parent company. I could have used all our parent company addresses as then they would be "guestd" but I'm sure this loophole will be closed shortly and isn't really fair - so wouldn't recommend it

gb82

Point (3) works perfectly (wink wink) - but for how long, who knows

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