Short answer

Even when a crew shares one work phone — or you only have one team mailbox — it's worth giving each person their own login, so Civic.ly records who did each inspection, completed each job, or raised each defect. The trick is email aliases (plus-addressing): from one inbox like grounds@yourcouncil.gov.uk you can create logins such as grounds+linda@yourcouncil.gov.uk and grounds+dave@yourcouncil.gov.uk. They're all the same real mailbox, so every set-up email (the verification code each person needs) lands in the one inbox, but each person signs in as themselves. Set them up as Field Operatives so they only see tasks assigned to them.

Detail

Why bother, when one shared login "works"? Because the value of the platform over time is the audit trail — being able to look back and see that this bin was emptied on Tuesday by this person, or that this play inspection was signed off by a named, qualified inspector. A single shared account loses that: every action just reads as "the team". For compliance and for going back through records after an incident, you want identity.

How to do it when people don't have individual work emails:

  1. Pick the mailbox you'll route to — e.g. grounds@yourcouncil.gov.uk (or neat@…, maintenance@…).
  2. In Manage account → add user, enter the email as an alias: grounds+linda@yourcouncil.gov.uk, first name Linda, surname, and choose Field Operative for the permission set.
  3. Civic.ly no longer sends temporary passwords. The confirmation email (with a verification code) is delivered to the underlying inbox (grounds@…). Open it, then on the shared phone Linda taps Set up your account, enters grounds+linda@…, types in the code, and sets her own password. (If she's ever locked out later, she uses Forgot password? on the app the same way.)
  4. Repeat per person. They can all use the same physical phone — they just sign in as themselves when it's their turn on that work.

This is a standard, well-supported email behaviour (the +tag part is ignored for delivery), not a Civic.ly hack — most mail systems support it.

Watch-outs

  • Set them to Field Operative, with task visibility on Own — otherwise each person sees everyone's tasks and the shared phone's list gets messy. See What can a Field Operative actually do in Civic.ly?.
  • Add a profile photo per person so it's easy to tell at a glance who a task is assigned to (the initials/avatar shows in lists).
  • Assign work to the individual, not just to a generic "team" account, for the identity to be meaningful — assign the actual tasks (or routine sub-tasks) to Linda/Dave.
  • If a worker genuinely never logs in (they only ever hand back a paper note), you can still record their work by logging the job against yourself as a reminder/sign-off — but you lose the take-a-photo-to-prove-it evidence trail. Onboarding them as a real (aliased) user is better where practical.
  • One person genuinely qualified to do a task (e.g. the only RoSPA-trained play inspector) is a separate point from device-sharing — they still want their own identity on the record.