For your office
Adding and Removing Staff Accounts on an Office AI System
October 6, 2026
A question that comes up after the machine is already running is what happens the next time someone joins the firm or leaves it. The answer is straightforward, but it is worth walking through because it is different from how most office software handles people coming and going.
Adding Someone to the System
Open WebUI, which runs on every machine we install, keeps its own list of accounts separate from anything in the cloud. Adding a new hire means creating a login on the box itself, the same way you would add a user to a shared drive. There is no vendor to notify, no seat to purchase, and no waiting on an outside company to process the request. Someone with admin rights on the machine, usually whoever we trained during install, adds the person and sets what they can see.
Training a new person takes less time than most office software rollouts because the interface is a chat window with a document library attached. Most staff are asking useful questions within the first sitting, and the harder habit to build is remembering to check the citations rather than trusting the first answer. We cover this during the install and again if a firm wants a refresher session later through a support plan.
Removing Someone Who Leaves
Offboarding is the deletion of a local account, not a cancellation request sent to a third party. When someone leaves the firm, their login is removed the same day, and with it goes their access to the shared document library and any saved conversations tied to their account. There is no lag between a person's last day and the system actually cutting them off, because there is no billing cycle or contract term to wait out.
This matters more than it sounds like it would. With cloud AI tools billed per seat, a departing employee's account often stays active until the next invoice, sometimes longer if nobody remembers to cancel it. On a machine the firm owns, access ends when the firm says it ends, and nothing about that account leaves the building to sit on someone else's servers in the meantime.
Department Workspaces Instead of One Big Pool
Firms above roughly ten people usually want more than a single shared library, since not every account should see every document. A Level 3 Firm setup, which runs on the larger end of the ladder, supports separate workspaces by department, so litigation staff see litigation files, bookkeeping sees the books, and a new hire in one group never has standing access to another group's material just because they share a machine. This is set up once during install and adjusted as departments change, not rebuilt from scratch every time someone's role shifts.
Smaller offices running a Level 2 setup with five or so concurrent users often skip department separation entirely and keep one shared library, since the whole point at that size is that everyone draws from the same set of documents anyway. Which structure fits an office is covered in more detail in the levels guide, and it is worth checking before assuming a firm needs the more complex version.
What This Looks Like Compared to a Cloud Subscription
Most cloud AI products tie accounts to a billing system, which means every hire or departure is also a finance task. Someone has to remember to add a seat, remember to remove one, and reconcile the invoice against the actual headcount every month. None of that applies here, because there is no recurring per-seat charge to track in the first place. The administrative work shrinks to the same kind of local account management an office already does for its email system or shared drives.
The tradeoff is that someone in the office needs to be comfortable doing that local administration, since there is no vendor support line handling it for you by default. That is exactly what a support plan is for: ongoing help with account changes, document library updates, and the occasional question about what a new hire should or should not be able to see.