Inviting New Members

Overview

How a new member joins your club sets the tone for their entire experience. A structured invitation process does more than just create an account — it ensures every member enters the system with the right access from day one, having agreed to your organization's terms, and knowing exactly who invited them and why. Centerline's invitation flow captures roles and aircraft permissions at the moment of invitation, so a new member can log in and immediately book a flight on the aircraft they are checked out on, without needing a follow-up call to get permissions sorted.

This also protects the organization. Rather than sharing a generic signup link, each invitation is personal, time-limited (7 days), and tied to a specific email address. Only the person with access to that inbox can accept it. That makes your membership roster auditable and intentional — every member was deliberately added by someone with the authority to do so.

Required Role

You must have either the Account Owner or User Management role to invite members.

Steps to Invite a Member

1. Navigate to Members — Click Members in the navigation bar.
2. Click Invite Member — The button appears in the top-right corner of the page. Clicking it opens the invitation form in a side panel or dialog.
3. Enter the email address — Type the new member's email. Centerline will check whether this address already belongs to an existing Centerline user.
4. Select aircraft access — Check the aircraft this member should be able to reserve. You can always adjust this later, but it is easiest to set it correctly upfront based on their checkout status.
5. Assign roles — Select the roles appropriate for this member. Most new members receive only the Member role. See Managing Member Roles for a description of each role.
6. Click Send Invitation — Centerline sends the invitation email and the pending invitation appears in the member list immediately.

What the Invitee Receives

The invited person receives an email containing:

• Your organization's name
• Your name as the person who sent the invitation
• A unique, secure link to accept the invitation and create their account
• The invitation's expiration date (7 days from when it was sent)

When the invitee clicks the link, they are taken to a signup form where they enter their first name, last name, phone number, and a password. Their email address is pre-filled from the invitation and cannot be changed. Once they submit the form, their account is created, their roles and aircraft permissions are applied automatically, and they are taken directly to the dashboard.

Invitation Status

Pending invitations appear in a card at the top of the Members page. Each invitation shows:

• Pending — The person has been invited but has not yet accepted. The link is still valid.
• Expired — The invitation was not accepted within 7 days. The link is now invalid.

Expired invitations are cleaned up automatically by the daily cron job, but they can also be cancelled manually at any time.

Managing Invitations

For pending invitations you can:

• Resend — Sends the invitation email again with the original link and expiration date. Use this if the member says they did not receive the email or it ended up in spam.
• Cancel — Removes the invitation entirely. The link in the original email will no longer work. Use this if the invitation was sent to the wrong address.

Existing Centerline Users

If the email address belongs to someone who already has a Centerline account (for example, a member of another flying club that also uses Centerline), they are added to your organization immediately without needing to go through the signup flow. They receive a notification email letting them know they have been added, and the organization will appear in their account the next time they log in.

Tips

• Double-check the email address before sending — typos are the most common reason invitations go to the wrong person.
• Set aircraft permissions at invitation time based on the member's current checkouts. It is better to start conservative and add more aircraft than to grant access to aircraft they are not yet qualified for.
• If an invitation expires before it is accepted, cancel it and send a fresh one. Resend only works on invitations that have not yet expired.
• If a member reports not receiving their invitation email, check the member list for a yellow warning triangle next to their email address — this indicates a deliverability issue. Ask them to check their spam folder and, if necessary, use a different email address.
• The Member role is automatically included with every account. You do not need to check it explicitly — every person in your organization has baseline member access.