Groups and auto-assign

Last reviewed: 2026-05-24

A group is a named set of users — Engineering, Sales, Contractors — that you can assign a policy to in one click. The key behaviour is auto-assign: when you add a user to a group that has policies attached, Accedo automatically creates the matching assignments for the new member and emails them signing links. This is the cleanest way to keep an evolving headcount in compliance without remembering to chase every new joiner. Groups are available on the Standard and Premium plans; the Groups page (/groups) shows an upgrade nudge on Free.

When to use a group

Reach for a group whenever the same set of policies applies to an evolving population — i.e. where membership churns but the policy list is stable:

Recurring cohorts. "All engineers must sign the secure-coding policy" — a group is right because new hires should pick up the policy on day one without admin intervention.
Departmental rollouts. "Finance signs the SOX attestation each quarter" — a group plus a recurring policy keeps the cycle running on its own (see Recurring acknowledgments).

For one-off pushes — "send this revised handbook to everyone right now" — assign the policy directly from the policy detail page; groups are heavier than you need. For onboarding bundles where the same several policies go to a single new hire, use a template; see Assignment templates.

Walkthrough — create a group and attach a policy

Open Groups from the sidebar (admin-only). A fresh workspace shows an empty-state card; click Create Group to start, or use the Create Group button in the page header if the list already has entries.
In the Create Group dialog, enter a name — e.g. Engineering. Click Create.
You stay in the dialog for step two — Add members. The list shows every active user; search by name or email at the top to narrow it. Tick the users you want in this group and click Add Members. (You can skip and add members later from the group's detail panel; if you do, the dialog closes and the new group appears with 0 members.)
The new group appears in the table with a member count. Click the row to open the detail panel.
To attach policies, leave the group detail open and switch to a policy. On the policy detail page click Assign, tick your new group under the Groups section of the assign modal, and click Assign to N users. Every current member of the group is assigned immediately, and the group-policy association is saved for the auto-assign step below.

What happens when you add a user to a group

This is the part that makes groups worth the extra setup. From the moment a policy is attached to a group, the group-policy link is durable: any user added later to that group is automatically assigned every policy on the group, with a signing-request email sent the same way it would be on a one-off assignment. The flow:

You open the group's detail panel and click Add Members.
You tick the new user (say, a freshly hired engineer) and click Add Members.
Accedo records the membership and emits a GroupMembersAdded event under the hood.
Within a few seconds, the policy service receives the event, looks up every policy attached to the group, and creates one new assignment per policy for that user. The user receives a signing-request email per policy (see Sign-off and magic links).

If the group has no policies attached yet, adding a member is a no-op as far as assignments go — nothing is created until the first policy is attached. If a user is already assigned a policy directly (for example, you assigned it to them individually before they joined the group), the auto-assign skips the duplicate; users never receive two signing links for the same current acknowledgment period.

Removing a member, deleting a group

Removing a user from a group has no effect on assignments already created on their behalf — pending acknowledgments remain pending, signed ones remain signed. The group simply stops auto-assigning future policies to them. To revoke a still-pending assignment, use the policy's acknowledgments view; see Declines, exceptions, and overdue items.

Deleting a group itself (from the row's overflow menu, with confirmation) detaches all policies from the group and removes the group from the list. Existing assignments — past or pending — are preserved exactly as they were; only the auto-assign mechanism stops firing for that group going forward.

Common questions

What if I rename a group? Renaming changes only the display name. Members, attached policies, and outstanding assignments all carry over.
Can a user be in multiple groups? Yes. They are auto-assigned the union of policies across every group they belong to. Duplicates are skipped — joining a second group that shares a policy with the first does not produce a second signing request.
How fast is auto-assign? Typically a few seconds. If a new hire has not received their signing emails after a minute, check Troubleshooting.