Accounts, profiles, and switching between them

Your account is how you sign in. A profile is the record of a person or an organization that other people can find, contact, and give to. One account signs you in, and that account owns one personal profile — plus any other profiles you have been asked to manage.

What belongs to which

Your account holds the things that stay the same no matter which profile you are working in: your sign-in email, your password and passkeys, two-step verification, connected Google / Apple / Facebook accounts, your time zone and date format, and your Messages mailbox settings.

A profile holds everything the public sees and everything the profile does: its name, photo, and biography; its connections; its updates; and, if it is receiving, its balance and payout history. Giving is also profile-scoped — donation history, scheduled gifts, wallet cards, and giving defaults belong to the profile that made them, not to your login.

Your personal profile

Every account has exactly one personal profile, marked Me in the sidebar’s profile selector. This is the profile you own outright. It appears in the directory under its username, and it is the profile your supporters, family, and colleagues connect with.

Profiles you manage

The profile selector at the top of the dashboard sidebar lists every profile your account can manage. Common reasons for a second profile:

A spouse or child — you manage the record and act on their behalf.
A missionary you administer — mission organization staff often manage the profiles of the people they send.
An organization — organization admins manage the organization’s profile, legal entities, staff, and programs.

Choose a profile and the whole dashboard re-aims at it: the pages in the sidebar, the balance you see, the wallet you edit, and the updates you write all belong to that profile.

Adding a profile

At the bottom of the profile selector, Add a profile opens a short dialog with two choices: Individual, for a child, dependent, or another person you manage, and Organization, for a new organization profile that Homeward reviews. Creating a profile does not create a second login — you keep using your own account to reach it.

Access roles

The authority you hold on a profile depends on your role:

Owner — your own personal profile. You have full control of it.
Manager / admin — you manage someone else’s individual profile, such as a family member’s. You can edit it and act for them in the dashboard.
Organization admin — you manage an organization’s profile, its staff roster, its programs, and its settings.
Staff — Homeward staff roles reach the administration area. Most users never see these pages.

A relationship is not an access grant

Homeward keeps relationships separate from authority, and one never implies another:

Appearing on an organization roster does not grant edit access to the organization’s profile.
Managing a person’s profile does not make you an administrator of the organization that sent them.
Enrolling a person in a program does not change their role in the organization.
A connection between two profiles is not an access grant — it only lets each side see the other’s private profile.

So if a page is missing from your sidebar, the usual cause is the profile you currently have selected, or the role you hold on it — not a broken account.