Understanding platform accounts

Last updated: November 2, 2026

A platform account is the parent account for a partner that offers Onboarded to its own customers. You build your standard setup there once, then share it with each customer's connected account.

What it is

Every organization in Onboarded has one of three account types:

Standard. A single account that builds its own setup and onboards its own candidates. Most direct customers have a standard account.
Platform. A parent account, usually held by a partner such as an ATS that offers Onboarded as the onboarding step in its own product. You build your shared setup here and distribute it to your customers' accounts.
Connected. A child account for one of your customers. It sits under your platform account, and it's where that customer's candidates get onboarded. See 📄 Understanding connected accounts.

Think of the platform account as your control center. It holds the standard setup every customer runs, and it decides which customer gets what.

If you remember nothing else: build shared setup in the platform account, and build customer-specific setup in that customer's connected account.

Why it matters

Without a platform account, every customer you bring on needs its own copy of every form, policy, and automation, built and fixed by hand. Across dozens of customers, one fix turns into dozens of edits. A platform account gives you one place to control shared setup and decide which customers receive each change.

This matters most when:

You offer Onboarded to your customers as part of your product, with one connected account per customer.
You bring on new customers regularly and want each one to start with your standard setup on day one.
Each customer needs its own users and data, kept apart from the others, while most of the onboarding setup stays the same.

The same model also works for a company running several brands or legal entities, with one connected account per brand.

How it works

Getting a platform account

Onboarded sets the account type. If you think you need a platform account, talk to your Onboarded team. You can't change an account's type from the dashboard, and an existing standard account can't be moved under a platform account from the dashboard.

To check which type of account you're in, look at the top of the sidebar. A blue bar next to the organization name means a platform account. A purple bar means a connected account. No bar means a standard account.

What you'll see in the sidebar

A platform account's sidebar starts with Connected Accounts and Bulk connect, and the platform account opens to Connected Accounts. That's the list where you create your customers' accounts and open them, and its Failed Distribution tab shows anything that didn't reach a customer. Bulk connect sends several forms, policies, or automations to several customers in one step.

Dashboard and Analytics don't appear in the platform account, because candidates aren't onboarded there.

What lives in the platform account

The platform account holds your templates:

Forms, and the policies that decide when they're assigned.
Automations.
Custom attributes. Turn on Auto-distribute to connected accounts on a custom attribute to copy it to every current and future connected account.

Nothing you build here reaches a customer until you distribute it. Distribution is where you choose which items each connected account receives and how each copy follows yours. With Auto Deploy, every new version you publish reaches the customer automatically, and a distributed policy or automation stays locked to your version. A form can also go out on Manual Deploy, so each new version waits as a draft until the customer publishes it. Each item's default decides what new customers get. You set all of this on the Connect tab of each form, policy, and automation, or for many at once with Bulk connect. See 📄 Understanding distribution to connected accounts.

Candidates, employees, placements, and tasks live in your customers' connected accounts, not the platform account. To work with them, you open the customer's connected account.

What reaches across every connected account

A few things in the platform account work across all of your customers at once:

Your users. Users in the platform account can open any connected account, and they have full access inside it, whatever user groups the customer has set up.
Your API key. Your product can create a connected account for each new customer through the API, then act on behalf of any of them by sending that account's ID in the Onboarded-Connected-Account-Id header. A live key reaches live accounts and a test key reaches test accounts.
Your webhooks. Webhooks set up on the platform account also receive events from every connected account. The Onboarded-Account-Id header on each delivery tells you which customer the event came from.
Your logo. Upload a Dashboard Logo in the platform account's organization settings (Settings → Organization). Connected accounts without a logo of their own show yours in the sidebar in place of Onboarded's.

Onboarded can also set up a custom subdomain for an account, so its dashboard and onboarding links carry your brand. Talk to your Onboarded team if you want one.

Anything you build in the platform account can end up in every customer's account. If one customer needs its own version of a form, policy, or automation, build it in that customer's connected account. Building one customer's setup in the platform account is the most common way it reaches customers that don't need it.

Example

Take an ATS that offers Onboarded as the onboarding step inside its own product. The ATS holds the platform account, and it's bringing its first three customers onto onboarding: Alder Logistics, Bellwether Health, and Copperleaf Foods. Each customer gets its own connected account, so its recruiters, candidates, and data stay separate from the other two.

Before any of them go live, the ATS's HR Engineer builds the standard setup once in the platform account: the I-9, the W-4, a direct deposit form, a handbook acknowledgment, the policy that assigns them, and a reminder automation for candidates who haven't started. The compliance forms and the policy default to Auto Deploy, so every customer runs the ATS's latest version. The handbook acknowledgment defaults to Manual Deploy, so each customer can swap in its own handbook before publishing a new version.

As each customer signs, the ATS's integration creates its connected account through the API, and everything with a default arrives on its own. When that customer's team logs in, the standard setup is already there. The reminder automation is only a starting point, so the HR Engineer sends it with Deploy now, and each customer words its copy its own way.

Bellwether Health also needs a license verification form for its nurses that Alder and Copperleaf don't use. That form and its policy are built inside Bellwether's connected account, so the other two never see them.

When the W-4 changes, the HR Engineer updates it once in the platform account, and all three customers pick up the new version. A fourth customer that signs next month starts with it too.