Scaling Teams & Organizations
Structure many members and teams, and control how usage is funded.
As your deployment grows from a handful of users to dozens or hundreds, a little structure goes a long way. This guide shows you how to organize members into teams, assign the right roles at scale, and control exactly how recording time is funded across your organization.
This page is about administering your own organization. To create an organization you need a paid plan, and per-seat collaboration features live on the Team and Enterprise plans. See Organizations Overview for the basics first.
The building blocks at scale
Kalima gives you three layers of structure. Used together, they keep a large account organized and keep billing predictable.
A typical large setup looks like this: one organization for the whole company, several teams inside it (Sales, Support, Research), and projects within those teams for recurring work that should share the same languages, context, and audio settings.
Organize teams within your organization
Teams let you mirror your real-world structure inside Kalima. Each team has its own name (unique within the organization), an optional description and color, its own members, and, if you want, its own billing rules.
Teams have two membership roles: lead and member. Only organization admins and the owner can create or manage teams. Deleting a team is a soft action, since it is marked inactive rather than erased, so you can reorganize without losing history.
Use teams to scope sharing. When you share a session, you can grant access to an entire team at once, so everyone in that team can open it without inviting people one by one. See Sharing a Session.
Roles at scale
Clear roles keep a growing organization manageable. Kalima uses distinct role sets at each level, so you can delegate administration without handing over everything.
Organization roles
| Role | What they can do | Uses a seat |
|---|---|---|
| Owner | Everything, plus delete the organization and transfer ownership. Cannot be removed. | Yes |
| Admin | Invite and manage members, create and manage teams, configure billing policy. | Yes |
| Member | Basic access to the organization. | Yes |
| Viewer | Read-only access to the member list. | No |
Team roles
| Role | What they do |
|---|---|
| Lead | Leads a team within the organization. |
| Member | Belongs to a team. |
For a complete cross-reference of every role across organizations, teams, projects, and shared sessions, see the Roles & Permissions Reference.
Only the owner can transfer ownership or modify the owner, and the owner can never be removed. Promote a few trusted admins so day-to-day management (invites, teams, billing) doesn't bottleneck on one person.
Best practices for delegating
- Keep owner with the person ultimately responsible for the account and billing.
- Grant admin to team leads or operations staff who handle invites and team setup.
- Use member for everyone who records and collaborates.
- Use viewer for stakeholders who only need to see who's in the organization. They don't consume a billable seat.
Manage members and seats
You invite people to your organization by email and assign them a role of member or admin (the creator is always the owner). Invitations are sent as an email link and expire after 7 days, so send a fresh one if it lapses.
What counts as a seat
On per-seat plans (Team and Enterprise), billing is driven by active seats. Active owners, admins, and members each count as one seat. Viewers do not consume a seat, and people who join a session through a share link are never seats either.
Adding or removing members adjusts your billing automatically, so you only pay for the access you actually have in use.
The Team plan supports up to 50 members. If you expect to grow beyond that, or need unlimited members, SSO, and priority support, move to Enterprise, where member and usage limits are custom. See Kalima for Enterprise.
Keeping membership tidy
- Suspend or remove members who leave the company so they stop consuming seats.
- Promote a backup admin before anyone with admin duties goes on leave.
- Transfer ownership (owner action only) before the current owner departs, since the owner can't simply be removed.
Control how usage is funded
The most important decision for a large deployment is where recording time is drawn from. Kalima lets you set an ordered list of funding sources, the funding order, at both the organization and team level.
The four funding sources, in their default order, are:
- Personal included: the member's own weekly plan allowance.
- Team shared: a balance held by the member's team.
- Organization shared: a balance held by the whole organization.
- Personal paid: the member's own purchased credits.
When someone records, Kalima draws time from these sources in the order you choose, falling through to the next source when one runs out.
Inheritance keeps it simple
You don't have to configure every team by hand. A team can inherit the organization's policy, and the organization can inherit Kalima's global default. Override only where a group genuinely needs different rules.
Common funding patterns
| Goal | How to set it |
|---|---|
| Members never spend personal credit on work recordings | Put organization shared (or team shared) first in the order, and fund that balance. |
| Each team manages its own budget | Give each team its own policy with team shared first, and top up each team. |
| Teams fall back to a company pool | Order team shared, then organization shared, so a team uses its own balance first and the company pool as backup. |
Fund the shared balance from the organization's Settings tab. There's a quick action to top up the organization or a specific team's balance right from the billing policy area. Managing billing policy requires organization admin or owner access. See Billing & Seats for the full breakdown of who pays.
Standardize transcription with projects
Beyond people and money, scale also means consistency. Projects let a team apply the same transcription settings to every session, so results stay uniform no matter who hits record.
A project stores defaults that its sessions inherit: language hints, a target language or two-way language pair, audio quality mode, session timeout, and context (free text up to 2,000 characters, or a saved context template). If a session drifts from those defaults it's flagged as diverged, and you can bulk-reset diverged sessions back to the project defaults in one action.
Project collaboration is separate from organization membership. You invite collaborators by email and give them a project role (viewer, editor, or admin), and those invitations also expire after 7 days. This is handy when you need to bring in an external transcriptionist or a client without adding them to your whole organization.
Limits to plan around
A few facts worth knowing as you scale:
- The Team plan caps total members at 50; Enterprise is unlimited.
- Only active owner, admin, and member roles use seats. Viewers and link-based viewers are free.
- Organization and project invitations expire after 7 days.
- All plans allow one recording at a time per person.
- A user already covered by an organization or team subscription can't also hold a personal plan, so manage their access through the org/team instead.
Frequently asked questions
The Team plan supports up to 50 members. Enterprise removes that cap and offers unlimited members along with custom limits, SSO, and priority support. See Kalima for Enterprise.
Active owners, admins, and members each count as one billable seat. Viewers do not use a seat, and people who open a session through a share link are never counted as seats.
Yes. Each team can either inherit the organization's billing policy or set its own funding order. For example, you can give one team its own shared balance that's drawn first, while other teams fall back to the organization pool.
Set the funding order so team shared or organization shared comes before personal sources, then keep that shared balance topped up. Recording time will be drawn from the shared pool first.
Only organization admins and the owner can create or manage teams and configure billing policy. Promote a few trusted admins so administration doesn't depend on one person.
Deleting a team is a soft action. It's marked inactive rather than permanently erased, so you can reorganize your structure without losing history.