Set Up a Team Where Each Member Has Their Own WhatsApp Number

This is the setup for a team where every member already has a professional WhatsApp Business number and wants to keep it: insurance brokers, property agents, franchise branches, field sales reps. Everyone keeps their own line and their own phone, each person sees only their own customers, and the manager runs the whole team from one workspace with one pipeline. It takes about an hour end to end, most of it waiting for QR scans.

The shape of it: one workspace on the Scale plan, owned by the manager; a custom "Broker" role limited to its own records; one WhatsApp number per member, connected in Coexistence mode and routed to that member. Everything below assumes that shape. If your team shares a single number instead, you want the ordinary team inbox setup in Invite your team, not this guide.

Part 1: the manager creates and prepares the workspace

1. Create the workspace. Sign up, or if you already use VGraple CRM open the organization switcher at the top of the sidebar and choose New organization. Your first organization is free forever; an additional organization is free to create and explore but needs a paid plan before it can connect a WhatsApp number, and the switcher says so before you create it.

2. Move it to Scale. Settings, then Billing, then choose Scale, monthly or annual. Scale includes 15 WhatsApp numbers and unlimited users, which covers almost every team of individual lines (Meta itself allows a verified business 20 numbers); the Growth plan works for up to five numbers and fifteen users if the team is small. There is no charge per number or per user beyond the plan.

3. Create the Broker role. Settings, Team, then the Custom Roles tab, then New Role. Name it something like Broker. In the module grid set Inbox, Contacts and Leads CRM to Edit. A Can see control appears under each of those three rows; set all three to Own records. Give the role whatever else the team needs - Templates at View, Appointments at Edit, Analytics at None or View - and create it. Own records means the member sees conversations, contacts and leads assigned to them, plus anything not yet assigned to anyone, so a record nobody has claimed is never invisible to the whole team. Built-in roles are untouched by this: owner, admin and supervisor keep full visibility, and that is who the manager should be.

4. Invite each member. Settings, Team, then Add Member. Enter the person's email and choose the Broker role. Two things can happen. If the person has no VGraple account yet, an account is created with the temporary password you set and they receive a verification email. If the person already has a VGraple account - common when a broker tried the product on their own first - the form tells you an invitation was sent instead. Nothing changes for them until they accept it; their existing workspace and password are untouched.

5. Decide how unassigned leads are distributed. Leads that arrive without an obvious owner - a form on the website, a campaign - can be balanced automatically across the team (Settings, Inbox, Auto-assignment), or sent to a specific person by campaign (Settings, Lead pipelines, the assignment rule on a campaign), or left for the manager to assign by hand. Anything that arrives on a member's own number is handled by Part 2 and does not need a rule.

Part 2: each member joins and connects their number

6. Accept the invitation. Members who already had a VGraple account log in to their own account, open the organization switcher at the top of the sidebar, and find the team workspace under Invitations. Accept joins the team; Decline discards it. Members whose account was created by the invitation simply verify their email and sign in.

7. Switch into the team workspace. From the organization switcher, choose the team workspace. Members who belong to only one workspace land there automatically.

8. Connect the number in Coexistence mode. Settings, Channels, WhatsApp, then Add a WhatsApp number and choose Coexistence. Scan the QR code from WhatsApp Business on the phone and approve chat history sharing when asked. The number keeps working in the phone app exactly as before; new chats appear in both places. The one-time import of past chats and contacts runs on its own in the following minutes. Each member does this once for their own number, and only the manager or an admin needs to be present if the workspace restricts channel settings.

9. Route the number to its member. On the number's card in Settings, Channels, WhatsApp, set Route new chats to the member who owns that line. From that moment every new conversation on the number is assigned to them the instant it arrives. Combined with the Own records role from step 3, this is what keeps each member's customers private to them: the conversation is theirs, the contact behind it becomes theirs when it is first assigned, and a lead created from it follows the same assignment. Leave the setting on Shared only for a number the whole team answers.

Repeat steps 6 to 9 for every member. The manager can watch numbers appear on the Channels page and check each one's routing at a glance.

Part 3: a member who already has their own workspace

Some members will have set up VGraple on their own before the team decided to consolidate, with their number connected and months of history. There are two ways to bring them in, and they are not mutually exclusive.

Move the number and its history into the team workspace. This is a built-in transfer, and it is safe for the number: it never disconnects and never stops working. After steps 4 and 6 (the member must be a member of the team workspace), the member opens their own workspace, goes to Settings, Channels, WhatsApp, and on the number's card chooses Move this number, then picks the team workspace and requests the transfer. The manager sees an Incoming number transfer card at the top of the team workspace's Channels page and accepts it. The number changes hands instantly - new messages already arrive in the team workspace - while conversations, messages, contacts, leads, notes and the number's templates follow in the background, with progress shown on both sides and an email to both owners when it completes. A contact the team workspace already talks to is merged into one record. What stays behind in the member's old workspace: its flows and automations, its broadcast history and any other numbers. Accepting counts as connecting a number, so the team plan's allowance applies at that moment - Scale allows 15 numbers, so count the team's lines before the move. After the move, do step 9 for the number and, if the old workspace had templates the team relies on, Part 4.

Keep the old workspace as it is and add a second number to the team. Some members prefer to keep a personal line separate. Nothing in their existing workspace changes; they simply connect their second professional number to the team workspace with steps 6 to 9.

Because the transfer needs the destination's explicit acceptance and can only target a workspace the requester belongs to, nobody can move a number out of a workspace without both sides taking part, and the member can cancel a pending request at any time before it is accepted.

Part 4: templates, flows and automations across the team's numbers

Flows, automation rules, quick replies, tags and pipelines are shared across the whole workspace automatically, whichever number a conversation is on. Templates carry one WhatsApp rule to know about: WhatsApp approves a template per Business Account, not per workspace. When every member's number sits on their own Business Account - the usual case when each person connected their own line - a template approved on one number does not exist on the others. You do not rebuild it. Open the template, choose Publish to other numbers, tick the numbers that need it, and a copy is created under the same name and submitted for approval on each of them; every copy then tracks its own approval on its own page. Numbers that share a Business Account are skipped, because they already have the template. Approval usually takes minutes to a few hours per number.

What the manager sees, and what each member sees

The manager, as owner or admin, sees every conversation in the inbox with a filter by number, every contact and every lead in the pipeline with a filter by assignee, and the per-agent report under Analytics showing each member's conversations, first-response times, leads and outcomes side by side. Each member on the Broker role opens the same inbox and sees only what is assigned to them, opens Contacts and sees only their own contacts plus any unassigned ones, and opens Leads and sees only their own leads plus any unassigned ones. A contact's assignee can be changed by the manager from the contact's edit dialog; the Assigned to field appears there once the workspace has more than one member.

Checklist

1. Manager: create the workspace, choose Scale, create the Broker role with Own records on Inbox, Contacts and Leads, invite every member.
2. Each member: accept the invitation, switch into the team workspace, connect their number in Coexistence mode, and have the number routed to them.
3. Members with an existing workspace: either move the number and its history into the team, or connect a second number.
4. Publish shared templates to every number that needs them.
5. Manager: set how unassigned leads are distributed, then watch the per-agent report.