"Why is it impossible to have two roles, owner and administrator?" It is the most common question at the start, and the answer is that there is nothing to choose between: these are not two roles, they are two different axes. There are in fact three.
The three axes
The access role decides what a person can do in the app. It is set in the "Edit" dialog, under "Access role".
Units describe what they own or occupy. That is managed in the "Units" column of the members list, or from a unit's own record.
A seat on the board says whether they are a director, and in what capacity. It is independent of the access role and — this is the part everyone misses — it grants no permissions. The access role alone determines what a person can open in the app.
One person carries all three on a single record. You own unit 596, you have the access role that lets you manage, and you sit on the board: one line in the members list.
One useful detail: you cannot change your own access role. That is deliberate — otherwise an administrator could lock themselves out of their own syndicate.
The "email already in use" message
It appears when you try to invite an address that already belongs to an account — very often your own.
The Invite button is for bringing in someone who is not here yet. You do not need to invite yourself: to attach a unit to your own record, use Edit units in the members list.
Two neighbouring cases are worth separating, because they do not behave the same way:
- The address belongs to someone already a member of this syndicate: nothing to invite, just assign them the unit.
- The address has a CondoAide account in another syndicate: the invitation goes out normally. They receive it and join your syndicate from their existing account — they do not need a second one.
A co-owner with no email address
Not everyone has an email address, and nobody is obliged to use the portal. Add without invitation exists for that.
The person is created from their name alone, and no email is sent. Their record carries a "No account" badge.
What they can still do: carry a real share of the common expenses, count for votes and quorum, appear in the register, sit on the board. Everything, in other words, that belongs to co-ownership.
What they cannot do: sign in, and receive email. The syndicate keeps reaching them the way it already does.
The way back exists: Invite to join later replaces the account-less record with real access, losing nothing.
Which email address should administer
CondoAide imposes nothing here, and that deserves to be said plainly: nothing in the product prefers one address over another. It is an organisational decision, not a technical constraint.
What the product does guarantee makes the question lighter than it looks. Transfer CondoAide administration hands the primary administrator role to another member — who must already belong to the syndicate — and that transfer touches no unit. The outgoing person keeps their record, their units and their share; they simply stop being the primary administrator.
So a personal account is not a trap: access transfers cleanly without disturbing ownership. Using a shared syndicate address is still possible and saves one step on the day of a handover, but it is not what protects the syndicate — the transfer is.
A unit's primary owner
Every unit that has owners has exactly one designated primary owner. That is not decorative: it determines who exercises the fraction's vote.
If you remove the person who is primary owner of a unit that has other co-owners, CondoAide warns you before confirming: the longest-standing co-owner takes that place, since every unit must have one. This changes neither the shares nor the voting rights — each undivided co-owner exercises theirs in proportion to their share (art. 1090 CCQ).