Short answer

No — each council is its own separate account on Civic.ly, and you sign in to each one with its own login (its own email address). If you clerk two or three councils, you'll have a separate Civic.ly login for each. They stay completely separate: each council's assets, tasks, users and records live in their own account, and signing into one never mixes in another's data. This is deliberate — it keeps each council's records cleanly separated for compliance and FOI, and matches how IT policies (Assertion 10) expect council data to be kept apart.

Detail

A lot of clerks look after more than one parish — "super clerks", as we used to call them. It's tempting to want one login that lets you hop between councils, the way some older systems allowed. Civic.ly doesn't do that, on purpose. Each council is a fully separate account (tenant), and you log in to the one you're working on with the email registered for that council.

In practice that means:

  • One login per council. Register a different email address for each council's account — e.g. your …@councilA.gov.uk clerk address for council A and your …@councilB.gov.uk address for council B. You then sign in as whichever council you're working on.
  • Use the device that suits you. Some clerks keep things separate by using a different laptop and/or phone per council; others use the same devices and just sign in and out. Either is fine — the separation that matters is the login, not the hardware.
  • Nothing leaks between councils. When you're signed into council A you only ever see council A's areas, assets, tasks and people. There's no shared list, no cross-council view.

Why we keep them separate rather than offering one master login: council records have to be auditable and FOI-able per council, and each council is its own data controller. A single shared login blurs that line and gets messy fast for compliance — so each council keeps its own front door.

Watch-outs

  • Set the camera/GPS up once per phone, not per council. The phone-camera location settings (so photos carry GPS for asset capture) are a phone-level setting — do it once on each device you'll use, regardless of how many council logins you sign into on it.
  • Don't reuse one council's email for another's account — keep the registered email distinct per council so password-reset emails and notifications go to the right place and the audit trail is clean.
  • This is about separate councils (separate accounts). Giving several people their own login within a single council — e.g. a shared work phone — is a different question; see the per-person login Q&A below.