Best practices in structuring SashiDo accounts

by Galya Titova

No matter if you are an independent developer or a manager of an app agency, you should always consider structuring your accounts in SashiDo in a way that will reflect your development process best.

Actually, it’s not only the development process that matters when creating accounts in SashiDo, but also the security factor. It’s really important to think how to protect yourself and your intellectual property in cases of a “bad will” actions from an employee or a partner, because … unfortunately such things happen sometimes.

So let’s start with the basics.

There are two types of SashiDo accounts - one is an app owner, one is a collaborator.

  • What makes one account an app owner is that it has apps and has added a credit card to pay for these apps.

  • The collaborator account is just an account that can be invited to work on specific apps by their app owners. This type of account doesn’t need to enter payment details as all bills for the apps are handled by their owners.

Important things to mention here are:

Only the app owner can:

  • Pay for the app
  • Delete the app
  • Ask for a transfer to another account
  • Add or remove collaborators
  • Turn on/off Automatic Database Backups
  • Manage Engine setup

Also invoices and emails regarding payment failure will be sent only to the account’s email and to the billing email if provided in the payment method.

Both app owners and collaborators can:

  • Manage the database
  • Manage the cloud code
  • Send push notifications
  • Restore backups
  • Do everything that is related to the app development and maintenance.

Before you register in SashiDo to create an app (or migrate one from other Parse Server) you should think about what email you want to use for this account. Does the email belong to an employee who has a chance to quit at some point? Is it an email that a lot of people can access, hence can change the password to SashiDo and steal or delete your apps? Is it an email that you read frequently or it’s just a dummy email no one keeps an eye on?

The best and secure way is to choose an email that only the most trusted people in the company will have access to. You can even create a special email for the purpose of registering a SashiDo account, but you should check this email regularly (or forward it to someone) as we may occasionally send you important information regarding your app.

One other thing you want to think about is how you are going to bill your clients.

  • If you prefer to send your clients an overall invoice for development and hosting you may prefer to have all your apps regardless of who your client is under the same SashiDo account. This way you will receive just one invoice from us, meaning less transactions and less stress for your accountant.
  • But if you wish to re-send the invoices from SashiDo and bill your clients separately for the development, you may prefer to have separate account for each of your clients. Even better - you may ask your client to create a SashiDo account, and enter their credit card details so you’ll not need to re-send invoices each month. Just remember that only the app owner can add collaborators, so every time you’ll want to add a new employee on the project you’ll have to ask them to do it for you.

When you finalize your decision about the account’s ownership it’s time to think about your employees. Remember, the collaborators accounts are free, so there’s no need to share a username and password between employees. Just ask all your developers or freelancers to create their own SashiDo accounts. This way you will have a better control over who’s working on an app, and will have an easy way to fully revoke access to someone if necessary.

What about the GitHub integration?

When you create an app in SashiDo, we create a private repo for this app and send a GitHub invitation to the app owner. And when the app owner adds or removes collaborators in SashiDo, their respective GitHub accounts (when linked) are invited or removed as collaborators to this private repository.

Two more things worth mentioning here:

  • a SashiDo account can be linked with only one GitHub account

  • one GitHub account can be used only for one SashiDo account.

This basically means that if your company is already using GitHub, the best way to structure your SashiDo accounts is by mirroring your structure from GitHub. Doing so, you’ll have an easy way to manage your employees and ensure security as well.

No matter how you decide to structure your company accounts, the most important thing is to feel comfortable with the current setup. Knowing that you created a strong foundation for your company to do business and grow is really an empowering feeling. But if you, at some point, decide that the structure you created is not suitable for you anymore, or you haven’t put much thought about it before - don’t worry! You can always rearrange it by requesting app transfers or account’s email changes. Just send us a support ticket through your app dashboard and we will help you organize your accounts in the way you want!

Happy Coding!