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Change who owns a record

Goal​

See who a record belongs to, and hand it to somebody else.

Prerequisites​

  • You can edit the record. If you can change it, you can hand it on.

Who owns a record​

Every record belongs to somebody: the person who created it, unless it has been handed on since. The owner can be a person or a team — a queue, a shift, a region — because work often belongs to a group rather than to one desk.

You change it on the record's Owner field.

From the Owner field on the form​

If whoever built your form placed an Owner field on it, you change the owner there, like any other field.

  1. Select the Owner box. A panel opens.
  2. At the top of that panel, choose User or Team. This comes first, and it changes what the list beneath offers — people and teams are two different lists.
  3. Search for and pick the new owner.
  4. Select Save.

Nothing happens until you save. Picking a name only fills the box in, exactly like typing a phone number: if you close the form without saving, the record still belongs to whoever had it.

You can do this while creating a record too. Fill in the Owner along with everything else, and the record is created and handed over in one step, rather than saved and then reassigned.

While the box is closed it shows the owner's name with a small icon in front of it. That icon says whether the owner is a person or a team — worth a glance, because two of them can have the same name.

There is no longer an Assign command​

There used to be an Assign button in the command bar, doing the same job through a dialog of its own. It is gone. The Owner field can point at a person or a team by itself now, so the command was a second way to do one thing — and the two behaved differently, which is worse than either: the field waited for Save, the command took effect the moment you confirmed it.

If your form has no Owner field on it, ask whoever built the form to place one. That is the one thing this change costs.

Why ownership is treated carefully​

Ownership is not a detail of the record like a phone number is: it decides who can see the record at all. So whichever way you change it, the platform checks the same things — that the new owner exists, that they are a person or a team, and that you were allowed to hand the record on in the first place.

Troubleshooting​

  • The Owner field is there but I cannot change it. — one of three things. You do not have permission to change the record (you cannot give away a record you cannot edit); the form was opened read-only; or you are on a User, Team or Organisational Unit record, where Owner is shown but never editable — those are what ownership is made of, so "who owns this team" is not a question with an answer.
  • There is no Owner field on my form. — it has to be placed, like any other field. Ask whoever built the form; the maker's own help covers adding a field to a form.
  • I cannot find User and Team on the form's Owner field. — they are inside the panel, at the top. Select the box first; the choice appears above the list of names it is filtering.
  • The person I want is not in the list. — the list is of users in this environment. Somebody who has never signed in to it may not appear yet.
  • I picked a team and the list went empty. — teams and users are separate lists; switching between them clears your pick on purpose, because a person is not a team.
  • "The record was saved, but its owner could not be changed." — exactly what it says, and the distinction matters: your other edits are stored, so do not retype them. Only the hand-over was refused, usually because the person or team you chose has since been removed, or because you are not allowed to give this record away. Reopen it and try the owner on its own.
  • I assigned it and can no longer find it. — that can happen once your administrator has set up access rules: the record may now belong to somebody whose records you cannot see.