ThirdSectorBee separates four ideas that look similar at first glance but mean different things in practice. Understanding them up front makes the rest of the help centre much easier to navigate.
Organisation
Your organisation is the top-level entity that signs up to ThirdSectorBee. It corresponds to your charity, CIC, or non-profit as a legal body. An organisation has shared settings — name, home country, home currency, email domain — that apply across everything beneath it.
Workspaces (tenants)
Within an organisation you have one or more workspaces — also called tenants. A workspace is an isolated container for contacts, donations, touchpoints, and so on. Most organisations only need one. Larger groups (e.g. a national charity with multiple regional offices) may have several.
Each workspace has its own:
- Contact, organisation, and thing records
- Touchpoints and payments
- Team membership and permissions
- Module configuration
Data does not leak across workspaces.
Modules
A module is a feature area — Relationships, Tasks, Importer, Gift Aid, Payment Statistics — that can be turned on or off per workspace. If a module is missing from your sidebar, an administrator hasn’t enabled it for your workspace.
Users and team membership
A user is a person with a login. A user can be a member of one or more workspaces, and within each workspace they hold a set of permissions (see Permissions and roles).
When you “invite a team member”, you are giving an existing or new user account access to your workspace — not creating an organisation-wide user.
Why this matters
Most settings questions become obvious once you know which level they live at:
- “Who are my colleagues?” → workspace level (Settings → Team)
- “What’s our charity’s home currency?” → organisation level (Settings → Organisation)
- “Why can’t I see Gift Aid?” → module level (administrator decision per workspace)
- “Why can’t I edit a contact?” → user permission level