Invitations or join codes
Roadmap Flow has two ways into a company, and they are not interchangeable. This page is the one-screen decision.
Use this when
- You are onboarding people and are not sure which mechanism to hand them.
- Somebody asks why their "code" does not work in the invitation box, or the other way round.
- An IT reviewer asks how people join your company.
What you need before starting
- To know which one you are holding. A join code is 12 characters shown as
FF7W-BNPR-HWCFand labelled INVITE CODE in the desktop app's Team tab. An invitation is a long link ending in/company/invite/#token=…. - Company owner or company admin, to issue an invitation. Join codes can only be generated by the account that owns the subscription, from the desktop app.
Step-by-step flow
Use an invitation when any of these is true — which is most of the time:
- The person should have a specific company role.
- The person should land on specific teams.
- You want it to expire on its own. Invitations last 14 days.
- You want to be able to revoke access for one person without disturbing anyone else.
- You want a record. Every invitation is created, resent, accepted or revoked in the audit log, with a name against it.
- Anyone outside your immediate team will ever ask how people join.
Use a join code when all of these are true:
- The company is small and everybody in it is a plain member.
- You are in the same room, or the same call, and want people in now.
- Nobody needs a pre-assigned team or a special role.
- Seven days is long enough — that is how long a code lasts.
What a join code actually does. It admits whoever holds it as a plain member with a licensed seat. It assigns no team and no special role. It is one shared secret: there is only ever one live code per company, generating a new one replaces the old one, and it cannot be revoked for one person while remaining valid for others.
How to move a company off join codes:
- Invite the people who joined by code to nothing — they are already members. Just set their roles and teams on People.
- Generate a new join code once, which invalidates the circulating one, then let the new one expire in seven days.
- Untick Allow shared join codes on Company settings so your position is recorded. Note that this setting records policy; it does not itself switch off a code that is already live.
- Use invitations from then on.
What good looks like
- Everyone joining after this week arrives with a role and teams already set.
- Nobody is passing a code around in a group chat.
- The Invitations page and the audit log together tell you how each person got in.
Common traps
- Pasting a join code into an invitation field, or a link into a code field. The console's join box accepts both and works out which is which; the desktop app's fields are more literal.
- Believing the join-code checkbox in Company settings kills a live code. It does not. Replace the code or wait out its seven days.
- Using a join code for a contractor who should be read-only. A code grants a full member seat.
- Expecting the person who joins by code to appear on a team. They will not be on one; add them on Teams afterwards.