Who can see what
Scout is used by whole shops, which means two people looking at the same page will often see different work. This article explains the four things that decide what you can see: which workspace you are in, your role, your teams, and where the evidence came from.
The workspace is a hard boundary
One workspace is one operating company. Points, evidence, teams, connections, receipts, and Found totals all belong to exactly one workspace, and nothing crosses between them. If you hold seats in two workspaces, switching between them switches everything — there is no combined view, by design.
Visibility is worked out before content is loaded
Scout does not fetch everything and then hide what you should not see. Your Inbox is assembled from the start as your Inbox: Scout works out which items you are authorized to see, then loads only those. The practical consequence is that a colleague's claimed work in a team you do not belong to is not on your screen in any form — not greyed out, not collapsed, not there.
The same rule governs your morning brief. Nothing appears in your brief that you could not open in the app.
Your role, and your teams
Role decides what you can do; teams decide most of what you can see. The scope control makes that visible:
- Mine — items assigned to you, claimed by you, followed by you, and the unclaimed queues of the teams you belong to. Everyone has this.
- A team — that team's queue. Available to the people in that team.
- All — everything visible across the workspace. Owners and Admins only.
Two things follow. A Member cannot ask for the company-wide view even by editing the address bar; the request is refused on the server. And a Viewer is not a restricted reader — Scout works out a Viewer's visible work exactly as it would for a Member in the same teams, and simply makes none of it actionable. See Roles.
Accountability and visibility are separate ideas. Being assigned something implies enough visibility to act on it, once any required review has been approved. Being able to see something never makes you accountable for it.
The three evidence tiers
A point can be visible to you without every layer beneath it being visible. Scout keeps three tiers, and they are what makes it possible to share a conclusion without sharing a mailbox.
| Tier | Who sees it | What it contains |
|---|---|---|
| Review metadata | The Owner or Admin reviewing a request to widen visibility | The linked customer and work, who the participants are, the destination Scout proposes, Scout's reasoning, and its confidence. No message body. No attachment. |
| Operational | The approved audience for the point | Scout's conclusion plus the minimum fact or short excerpt needed to act on it. |
| Original | Only people who are entitled to the source itself | The full message, the attachment, the raw record, and the link that opens it at the provider. |
Being able to see a point never grants the original tier. If you do not have access to the mailbox or the accounting company an item came from, you see Scout's conclusion and the excerpt, and the "open in source" link is simply absent.
Personal mail stays personal
A personal mailbox is connected by the person whose mail it is, and they are its source owner. Work Scout derives from it starts visible to them alone.
When such a point turns out to matter to a colleague, Scout does not widen it quietly. It opens a visibility review.
What happens, in order:
- The point stays assigned and visible to the source owner. Nothing has moved.
- Scout queues a review proposing a destination — a specific colleague, or a team — and explains why it thinks the work belongs there.
- An Owner or Admin opens the queue and sees review metadata only. The panel says so on the page: the message body and attachments are not available at that tier, and would not be, whatever the reviewer decides.
- The reviewer chooses Approve and assign, Edit destination, or Deny. Approving grants the operational tier and makes the new person accountable in one action.
- The source owner keeps their visibility. The original message moves nowhere.
- A denial leaves the point private, and becomes feedback that improves how Scout routes similar work later.
Every decision is recorded with who made it and when, has a history view, and can be undone. Members and Viewers do not see this queue at all — the page does not exist for them.
A shared mailbox works differently on purpose. It belongs to a team rather than a person, so its work routes inside that team without a personal-mail review. That is the right home for a sales or orders address. See Team-owned vs personal sources.
Housekeeping is separate from work
Points about a connection that needs attention are addressed to administrators, not to whoever happens to be nearby. They do not appear in a Member's Inbox, and the alerts bell says as much: it carries connections and account housekeeping, while client work stays in the Inbox.
Delivery diagnostics are scoped the same way: the Slack panel in Settings shows your own delivery history and nobody else's. What an Admin sees there is the health of the workspace's Slack installation.
Good to know
- Deactivating a seat removes access immediately. Their past work, claims, and receipts stay in the record; their view closes.
- Every change of visibility is a recorded event, not a silent setting. So is every claim, closure, and reassignment.
- A point with no evidence cannot exist, and evidence cannot be edited after the fact. That is what makes the record worth trusting when two people disagree about what happened.
- No role in Scout grants blanket access to a colleague's mailbox. Not Admin, not Owner.
- The legal statement of all this is in the Privacy Policy.