Settings, roles and team

Where you control how Handshake behaves - who is on your team and what they can do, how the platform looks under your brand, your agreement templates, when and how fast messages send, and which alerts you get.

What it is

Settings is where you set up the rules Handshake follows. It covers four things: your team (who has access and what they are allowed to do), your branding (how the platform and emails look to your clients), your sending preferences (timezone, which days messages go out, daily and weekly caps), and your notifications (which alerts you want).

Settings exist at every level of the hierarchy - partner, client, and account - and they flow downward, so you set something once at the top and it applies everywhere below unless you deliberately change it lower down.

Why it exists

Without settings, every client and every account would have to be configured from scratch, and there would be no single place to control safe sending or who can do what. Settings let an agency set sensible defaults once (for example "send Monday to Friday, in the client's timezone, up to 20 connection requests a day") and have every client and account inherit them automatically, while still allowing a specific client or account to override where it genuinely needs to.

Who can see it

Everyone sees a Settings area, but what is inside depends on who you are:

  • Partners see and edit their own company settings, branding, team, and the defaults their clients inherit.
  • Clients see their own settings and can override the defaults their partner set.
  • Seat users see settings for their own connected identity - their profile, sending limits, and notifications.
  • Admins (the Handshake platform team) also see system-wide settings that set the defaults everyone else inherits. These system tabs are internal and are not visible to partners or clients.

Within those views, what you can change also depends on your role (see the team table below). A view-only user can look but not save; an approver can approve messages but not reconfigure the team.

How it works

Where settings live: The four levels

Handshake settings cascade down the hierarchy. When the platform needs a value, it looks for the most specific one set and works upward until it finds one:

account  →  client  →  partner  →  system (Handshake default)

So a sending limit set on one account wins for that account. If nothing is set there, the client's value applies. If the client has not set it either, the partner's default applies, and finally the platform default. This is why most things "just work" without you touching them - they are inheriting a sensible default from above.

  • Partner settings are your agency-wide setup and the defaults your clients inherit. Find them under Settings in the partner view.
  • Client settings start as a copy of the partner defaults. You can override any of them; a Reset to Inherited button puts a setting back to the inherited value.
  • Seat settings are for a single connected LinkedIn/email identity - the person's profile, their sending limits, and their notification choices.

Settings are grouped into tabs such as Branding, Limits, Workflow, Notifications, Features, and Preferences. Each tab has its own save bar: make your changes and use Save, or Discard to roll them back.

Team members and roles

You invite teammates from the Users (team) area of Settings. Each person gets a role, and the role decides what they can do. Roles come in two families: partner roles for people inside an agency, and admin roles for the Handshake platform team.

Partner team roles

There are four partner roles. This is the canonical "who can do what":

Capability Owner Admin Approver View-only
View clients, seats, campaigns, messages Yes Yes Yes Yes
Create and edit clients Yes Yes No No
Create and edit seats Yes Yes No No
Create and edit campaigns Yes Yes No No
Approve / reject / edit drafted messages Yes Yes Yes No
Invite teammates Yes Yes No No
Change a teammate's role Yes No No No
Remove a teammate Yes No No No
Edit partner-wide default settings Yes Yes No No
Edit individual seat settings Yes Yes Yes (own) No
Edit notification preferences Yes Yes Yes No
View financial / billing figures Yes View only No No
Edit financial / billing settings Yes No No No

In short:

  • Owner - full control of the agency, including the team and the money. This is the only role that can change other people's roles or remove them.
  • Admin - runs the day-to-day: Clients, seats, campaigns, approvals, and settings. Cannot change teammates' roles or edit financial settings, but can see financial figures.
  • Approver - focused on quality control. Reviews and approves the messages that go out, and can manage their own seat settings, but cannot reconfigure clients, seats, or the team. Cannot see revenue or earnings.
  • View-only - read access to everything in the partner org, with nothing editable. Good for a stakeholder who wants to watch progress.

Clients have the same four roles (Owner, Admin, Approver, View-only) applied to their own organisation.

Admin (platform) roles

These are internal Handshake roles and are not something partners assign:

  • Super Admin - full access to everything across all partners, including other admins.
  • Admin - manages partners, content, and platform settings.
  • Support - can view data and generate documents to help partners, with minimal editing.
  • Viewer - read-only access across the platform.

A note on roles versus permissions: The role you pick sets a sensible starting list of permissions, but the actual check at the moment you click a button reads your saved permissions, not just your role label. In normal use they line up with the table above.

Branding and white-label (partners)

Partners can white-label Handshake so clients see your brand, not ours. Branding lives in the Branding tab of partner settings (admins set the platform-wide default that new partners start from).

You can configure:

  • Logos - a light-background logo, a dark-background logo, and a favicon (the small icon in the browser tab). Supported as PNG, JPEG, SVG, or WebP.
  • Colours - primary, secondary, and accent colours, plus light and dark mode variants for backgrounds, cards, and text.
  • Dark mode - turn the dark theme on or off.
  • Use Handshake branding - a toggle to fall back to the standard Handshake look instead of your custom brand.

A live client portal preview shows how your branding will look to clients as you edit. Your branding flows down the same way settings do: It applies to the partner portal, your clients' portals, the account experience, and branded emails (client invitations, booking confirmations, agreement notifications, and the like). A client can set their own branding to override what they inherit from you.

Message and agreement templates

The Templates area holds agreement templates - the legal/contract text used when you onboard a client or send an agreement. (These are agreement documents, not the outreach message copy - the wording of campaign messages is handled in Campaigns and the Outreach Hub.)

A template has a name, an optional description, and the content (the agreement text). Content can include placeholders like {{CLIENT_NAME}} that get filled in automatically when the agreement is generated.

How it works depends on who you are:

  • Handshake admins create and maintain the master library of templates, and can mark one as the default that every new partner starts with.
  • Partners see those master templates as read-only and can Duplicate one to make their own editable copy. You then edit your copies, and can Set as default so a given template is used for your new client agreements. You can only edit and delete your own custom templates, not the master ones.

Find partner templates under the Agreements section of partner settings.

Sending: Timezone, sending windows and limits

These settings decide when outreach goes out and how much. They are the ones partners ask about most.

Timezone. Each campaign runs in a timezone, and you set the default timezone in the Workflow settings (partners set the default; clients and accounts inherit it). The default is UTC until you change it. Timezone matters because Handshake sends during normal working hours in that timezone - so if a campaign is set to a client's local timezone, a "morning" send lands in their morning, not the server's. Setting the right timezone is the single most effective way to make sends feel natural. New campaigns pick up this default, and you can also set it per campaign.

Sending days (the sending window). The Default Campaign Run Days setting controls which days of the week campaigns send. Out of the box this is Monday to Friday - weekends are off. Like timezone, it is a default that new campaigns inherit and can be adjusted per campaign.

Connection-to-message delay. After someone accepts a connection request, Handshake waits before preparing the first follow-up message draft. The default wait is 1 day; you can set it anywhere up to 14 days, or choose Instant to prepare the draft right away. This keeps the follow-up from feeling robotic the instant a connection is accepted.

Daily and weekly caps. Sending limits protect the account from LinkedIn restrictions. The defaults are:

Limit Default Maximum you can set
LinkedIn connection requests per day 20 100
LinkedIn connection requests per week 100 500
Outreach emails per day 200 1000

These flow down the hierarchy like everything else: A partner sets a default, a client or account can lower (or raise, within the maximum) it. The default LinkedIn figures sit at LinkedIn's commonly cited safe levels on purpose.

Important: These caps are the ceiling. The amount actually sent on any given day is usually lower, because new accounts ramp up gradually through warm-up and Handshake paces sends to look human. Warm-up and account-safety behaviour are described in LinkedIn accounts and account safety; the numbers here are the upper bounds those systems work within.

Notifications

Notifications tell you when something needs your attention - a draft to approve, an import finished, a LinkedIn account disconnected, a billing event. You control them in the Notifications tab, and preferences can be set at the partner, client, and account level.

  • There is a master on/off switch for non-essential notifications.
  • Each notification type (for example "import complete", "connection requests running low", "weekly roundup") can be turned on or off individually.
  • A few high-volume ones - like an email every time a connection is accepted or a reply comes in - are off by default so your inbox does not fill up. Turn them on if you want them.
  • Essential (transactional) notifications always send regardless of your settings - things like invitations, agreement-ready and agreement-signed notices, security alerts, and account-suspension notices. You cannot switch these off.

Notification choices also cascade: If a setting is turned off higher up (partner or client), it stays off for the people below, and the most restrictive level wins. Notifications are delivered by email today.

Limits and what to watch out for

  • Inheritance can surprise you. If a client's setting looks "wrong", check whether it is inheriting from the partner default. Changing the partner default changes every client that has not overridden it. Use Reset to Inherited to drop a client or account override and follow the parent again.
  • Timezone is easy to forget. A campaign left on the default UTC will send at hours that may feel odd to the recipient. Set the timezone to match where the prospects are (or the client's working hours) before launching.
  • Caps are ceilings, not targets. Setting the daily limit to the maximum does not mean that many will send - warm-up and pacing still apply, and pushing seats hard risks LinkedIn restrictions. See Seats and account safety.
  • Only Owners can reshape the team. If you need to change someone's role or remove them and the option is greyed out, you are probably an Admin, not an Owner - ask an Owner.
  • Approvers and View-only cannot change settings. That is by design. If you cannot save a change, check your role against the table above.
  • Essential emails cannot be silenced. If you are getting invitation, agreement, or security emails you did not expect, that is intended - those always send.
  • Partner master templates are read-only to partners. To change agreement wording, duplicate the template first, then edit your own copy.