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.

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.
  • Creates one team, so there is somewhere for documents to live immediately.
  • Moves your session into the new workspace, so the next screen is already inside it.

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

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.

Personal workspaces

Signing up without being invited to an organization can leave you in a personal workspace — a workspace of one, useful for looking around.

It has one real limitation worth knowing, because the error is otherwise puzzling: you cannot invite anyone into a personal workspace. Attempting it is refused with a message telling you to create or switch to a team workspace first. If you intend to work with colleagues, create a proper workspace and invite them there.

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, control and piece of evidence. 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; deleting a team keeps its control history; closing a workspace keeps nothing.

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