Team-owned versus personal sources
A connection is the card. A source is one actual thing behind it that Scout reads — one mailbox, one accounting company, one supplier account. Who owns a source decides two things: whose work it becomes, and who has to approve before that work reaches anyone else.
The three kinds
| Label on the source | Owned by | What it means for work |
|---|---|---|
| PERSONAL MAILBOX | The person who authorized it | Work found in it is theirs. It routes to them. If it matters to a colleague, it waits for a visibility review. Only the mailbox owner can pause, reconnect or disconnect it. |
| SHARED MAILBOX | A team | Work routes into that team's queue and any member of the team can claim it. No personal-mail review, because nobody's private mail is involved. |
| COMPANY SOURCE | The workspace | Visible company-wide, subject to role and team scope. It has a default team that work falls to when Scout cannot name a better destination. QuickBooks Online and your PromoStandards suppliers are company sources. |
Where to see it
- Open Connections.
- On a connected card, choose Manage access, or click the card to open its detail page.
- Each source is listed with its kind, and two facts: OWNED BY and DEFAULT TEAM.
Screenshot: source ownership under Manage access.
If nothing has been set you will see No team owns it yet or No default team yet, and for a personal mailbox the default-team row reads "Not used · owner routes work" — the owner is the routing.
What a team-owned source routes
Scout proposes a destination for every point, and it works down a fixed order of preference:
- An exact owner named upstream who matches an active person in your workspace.
- Whoever already owns the linked customer, quote, job or invoice.
- The owning team of a shared or company source.
- The person who owns a personal source.
- The source's default team.
- Everyone, visibly marked Unassigned.
So a team-owned source is how you make sure a whole category of work lands somewhere specific: put orders@ on Production and every order confirmation that arrives there is Production's, without anyone routing it by hand.
Routing is a proposal, not permission. A destination proposed from someone's personal mailbox stays proposed until the visibility expansion is approved.
Change the owning team
- Open the connection and find the source under Manage access.
- Choose the new owning team, or the new default team.
- Scout confirms the change. If it cannot confirm it, it says "We could not confirm that change. Refresh the connection before trying again" rather than pretending it saved.
Only an Owner or an Admin can move a source between teams. A Member can manage their own personal mailbox and nothing else.
Good to know
- Changing ownership changes where new work routes. Items already claimed stay with the person who claimed them.
- One connection can hold several sources of different kinds at once — three personal mailboxes and a shared mailbox all sit under the Microsoft card.
- Each source has its own health. One expired authorization shows as ONE GRANT EXPIRED on the connection without stopping the others.
- When a source is disconnected, the addresses it was authoritative for are released, so another connected source can take over cleanly.
- Teams themselves — creating them, membership, the fallback team — are covered in the Teams article under Teams, people, and permissions.