Workspaces

Creating a workspace, what its name controls, switching between workspaces, and what closing one actually does.

A workspace is your organization inside Alchex — members, teams, settings and billing. This page covers the whole life of one.

Creating a workspace

A workspace is created when you submit a name, and not before. There is no step where clicking something produces an unnamed workspace you then have to rename, which means you cannot end up with stray empty workspaces from a mis-click.

You also confirm the workspace's time zone here. It opens on your browser's own guess, so for most people this is a glance rather than a decision.

Submitting the name does several things at once:

  • Creates the workspace with you as its Owner.
  • Claims the name and derives the workspace's address from it.
  • Records the time zone the workspace runs on.
  • Creates one team, so there is somewhere for documents to live immediately.
  • Moves your session into the new workspace, so the next screen is its dashboard, already inside it.

The same path creates your first workspace and every later one.

If you arrived from a link your partner sent you, submitting the name takes you back to that link instead of the chat, and the plan your partner paid for is applied to the workspace you just created. See Seats and licences.

Two rules apply at this door:

  • One owned workspace per account. You can be invited into as many workspaces as your work needs, but you create and own one of your own. If you already own one, creating another is refused and you are taken to the workspace you have — upgrade or grow that one rather than starting a sibling.
  • A real email address. Sign-up refuses addresses from temporary-email services. A workspace comes with its own AI allowance, so it is only made for an address someone actually keeps — use your work or personal email.

The workspace's language

Settings → General → Language is the language the assistant writes in when it works for the whole workspace with nobody signed in — a corrective action it drafts overnight for a finding, for example — and the language a new member starts in on their first sign-in. It is an admin's setting, like the clock, because it speaks for everyone. Until someone chooses, the assistant writes such work in English.

It never overrides a person. Each member picks their own language under Settings → Profile; that choice is saved to their account and wins over the workspace's whenever they are the one asking. See AI review and assistance for what follows a person's language.

The workspace's clock

Settings → General → Time zone holds one answer for the whole workspace, and you find it by country: picking Türkiye stores Europe/Istanbul. Countries that span several zones list each of theirs separately, because there is no single answer for them.

What it governs is scheduled automations. It does not change the times people see on screen: dates and times in the app — when a comment was posted, when a review was approved — always show on each person's own clock, the one their computer is set to. Two colleagues in Istanbul and London see the same moment as 09:00 and 07:00.

An automation that says every day at 09:00 means 09:00 on this clock — so a workspace set to Türkiye has its nightly sweep at 09:00 in Istanbul, not at 09:00 somewhere else. It follows daylight saving on its own: 09:00 stays 09:00 on both sides of the change.

Two things worth knowing:

  • A workspace that has never answered runs on UTC. That is what every workspace did before the setting existed, so nothing moved when it arrived — but if your working day is not UTC, your schedules are firing at the wrong hour until you set this.
  • Changing it moves every schedule with it. Set the workspace to Türkiye and a 09:00 sweep that had been running at noon starts running at 09:00. That is the point, but it is a change everybody on the register sees.

Only an Owner or Admin can change it: it moves when everyone's automations fire, so it is not a personal preference.

The organization's document style

Settings → General also holds the other workspace-wide answer, below the workspace's name and address: the workspace's style sheet — four named styles, each with its own font and its own point size. Body is what paragraphs read in; Heading 1, Heading 2 and Heading 3 are the three heading levels the editor offers, each set separately. Every row offers the same font list the editor has always had — Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia, Verdana, Trebuchet MS, Tahoma, Courier New — plus Default, the app's own face; sizes are typed or stepped in points. Set it once and every document follows; nobody opening a document has a typography decision to make, which is exactly how a document set stays looking like one set.

If you set heading sizes out of order — a lower level larger than the one above it — a quiet note says so. It never blocks saving: the organization is the authority, and the note just keeps the state visible.

Below the styles sits the page every document is laid out on: its page size (A4 or Letter) and the header and footer text printed on every page. In either one, {page} becomes the page number and {total} the number of pages; leave it empty for none. Until someone chooses, documents are A4 with a footer reading "Page 1 of 3". A change shows in documents that are already open, without reloading them, and nothing in a document's text changes. A Word download is laid out on the same page, with the same header and footer and the page numbers kept live.

Two things worth knowing:

  • A workspace that has never answered uses the app's own look. Nothing changed when the setting arrived; the first pick is when documents move.
  • This is the only font control in the product. Documents carry no font chrome of their own — no chip, no per-document exception — so the style you set here is the style every document has, without policing.

Only an Owner or Admin can change it: it moves how everyone's documents read, so it is not a personal preference.

What the name controls

The name is both the display name and the source of the workspace address, which is why it is not free text:

  • Names are claimed globally. If another organization already holds the name you want, yours will be refused and you will be asked for a different one. This is about addresses being unique, not about who "owns" a word.
  • There is a length limit, and names that cannot produce a usable address are refused.
  • The address follows the name. Renaming later changes the address too, so links people have saved to the old one stop resolving.

Pick the name you actually call the organization. Avoid dates, project codes or anything you expect to change.

Switching workspaces

If you belong to more than one workspace, you switch between them in settings, under Workspaces. Switching changes everything the app shows you — documents, teams, members, billing — because the workspace is the boundary all of it sits inside.

Nothing is shared across that boundary. There is no cross-workspace search, no moving a document from one workspace to another, and no role in one workspace that grants anything in another.

Renaming a workspace

A workspace Owner or Admin can change the name in settings. The new name goes through the same global claim as a new one, so it can be refused if taken.

Remember that the address changes with it. If people have bookmarked or shared links, tell them.

Closing a workspace

Deleting a workspace is permanent and it takes everything with it — every team, document, draft, version history, approval record, risk and register record. There is no undo and no export-on-the-way-out.

Two guards stand in front of it:

  1. You must type the workspace name exactly. Not a checkbox, not an "are you sure" — the literal name.
  2. A workspace that is still billing cannot be deleted. If the plan has a future invoice coming, deletion is refused. Cancel the subscription first, then close the workspace.

The second guard is enforced on the server, so the screen telling you about it is reporting a real rule rather than a suggestion. If billing cannot be read at that moment, the dialog cannot warn you in advance and the server will still refuse — so a surprising refusal here is the plan gate, not a bug.

Closing a workspace is the only irreversible action in Alchex that destroys published records. Archiving a document keeps it; closing a workspace keeps nothing.

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