Super Admin Getting Started

Who this is for: You’ve been given super-admin access to Adva and your job is to stand up customers — create their account, invite their owner, and get their data flowing. This guide walks through the end-to-end flow in plain English, including what your customer will actually see on their end.

What Adva gives you as a super admin

Super admin is the top-level role inside Adva. You can:

• Create new customer accounts (the billing-tenant level — one account per customer company)
• Invite the customer’s owner by email (they’ll set up their password and log in)
• Impersonate any customer to check their setup or troubleshoot live issues
• See and repair users across every account — including recovering someone who got stuck during sign-up
• Import data on a customer’s behalf (CSV uploads, Airtable extracts)

You cannot directly change a customer’s business data without impersonating them first — that’s deliberate. Everything you do on a customer’s behalf is logged to an audit trail.

Your first login

Sign in at the Adva login page using the email and password your Adva contact sent you. After login:

• You land on the Super Admin home with an Accounts overview (every customer on Adva)
• The top-right impersonate switcher shows a list of every business you have access to
• The left sidebar shows Admin-only views: Accounts, Users, Imports, Audit

If you see a dashboard that looks like a regular customer’s home instead, your account is not yet flagged as super-admin — ping your Adva contact.

Creating your first customer account

Example: you’re setting up Canopy Home Services as a new Adva customer. Their turf-care division is Canopy Turf and the owner’s email is owner@canopyhs.example.

1. Open the Accounts list

Click Accounts in the sidebar. You’ll see every existing customer account. Confirm the list loads and shows row totals at the top.

2. Start a new account

Click Create New (top-right). A form opens asking for:

• Account Name → Canopy Home Services
• Account Slug (auto-filled lowercase; you can edit) → canopy-home-services
• First Business Name → Canopy Turf (the first operating division under this account)
• Owner Email → owner@canopyhs.example
• Owner First / Last Name → optional but recommended — the invite email addresses them by name

3. Duplicate-email check

When you tab off the Owner Email field, Adva checks whether this person already has an Adva login somewhere.

• New email — form submits normally.
• Already has an Adva login — you’ll see a prompt: “This email is already on Adva. Link the existing user to this new account?” Click Yes if it’s the same person (they’ll get added to the new account without a fresh invite email). Click Cancel if it’s an unrelated collision (you’ll need a different email).

4. Submit

Click Create. Adva:

• Creates the Account row
• Creates the First Business row
• Creates an invited-status user row for the owner
• Sends them an invite email from noreply@mail.getadva.ai (or noreply@mail.staging.getadva.ai on staging)

You’ll see a confirmation banner. The new account appears at the top of the Accounts list.

What your customer experiences

From the customer’s side, here’s what happens after you click Create:

1. Invite email arrives — subject: You’ve been invited to Adva. From: Adva AI. Body includes their name, the account name you just created, and a Set up your account button. (On staging, the subject starts with [Staging] so you can tell environments apart.)

2. They click the button — opens Adva, asks them to set a password.

3. First login — they land on the main customer home for their account (Dashboard / Customers / Deals / etc.). No more onboarding steps. They’re in.

4. What they see — a freshly-provisioned account with no customer data, no deals, no jobs. Just the Canopy Turf business pre-created with them as the owner.

Getting their data in quickly

The owner (or you on their behalf, via impersonate) has a few ways to move data in:

• Import CSVs — Sidebar → Import. Upload customer lists, deal pipelines, product catalogs. Adva walks them through column mapping.
• Use Claude + the Adva MCP server — the fastest path for messy or multi-sheet data. Connect an AI assistant (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or Cursor) to the Adva MCP server and paste or reference a CSV. The assistant picks the right schema, suggests column mappings, validates records, and submits them — same guardrails as the CSV path but much less clicking. See the MCP Server Overview for connection details and supported clients.
• Install the Adva Superpowers plugin (Claude Code users) — a marketplace plugin that bundles the Adva MCP server + a set of task skills (create customer, import deals, triage orphaned users, etc.) so Claude Code picks them up automatically. Repo: github.com/rightsite-cloud/adva-superpowers. Follow the README’s install instructions; no separate MCP config needed.
• Add businesses manually — if Canopy Home Services also operates Canopy Coatings, the owner creates a second business under the same account from Settings → Businesses.
• Invite more admins — (coming soon) from Settings → Team, owners will be able to add their own admins without needing super-admin help. Until that ships, use the impersonate + invite flow below.

To import on the customer’s behalf: Accounts list → click the customer → Impersonate as Owner. You now see Adva as they see it. Import (via UI, MCP, or Superpowers). Then click Stop Impersonating top-right.

Quick recommendation for a first-time import: If the customer has clean, well-labeled CSVs, use the Import UI — it’s visual and forgiving. If the CSVs are messy, split across many sheets, or extracted from Airtable/Jobber/etc. with non-obvious column names, skip the UI and use the MCP server + Claude or the Superpowers plugin — the AI will do the column-mapping work you’d otherwise fight through manually.

If something looks off

The invite email didn’t arrive

Wait two minutes — Postmark occasionally delays. If still nothing:

• Check the customer’s spam folder first.
• Have the customer try Forgot Password? on the login page; it sends a separate reset email that takes a different delivery path and usually works even when the invite didn’t land.
• From the Accounts view, open the customer’s Users tab, find the pending owner, and click Resend Invite.
• If it still doesn’t arrive, ask your Adva contact to check the Postmark Activity stream for a bounce.

The customer logs in but sees “You don’t have an account”

This used to be a common snag. It’s mostly fixed as of April 2026, but if it happens:

• Open the customer’s Users tab (Accounts → the customer → Users).
• Find their row — status will show as Orphaned.
• Click Force-Link. Adva will match their login to their account record. They can refresh the page and will be in.
• If force-link doesn’t work, use Revoke & Reinvite instead — deletes the stuck row and sends a fresh invite that starts clean.

A newly-created business doesn’t appear in the impersonate picker

Hard-refresh the admin console (⌘R / Ctrl-R). If it still doesn’t show up, ping your Adva contact — this used to be a known issue and should be resolved, but report if you see it.

I get two users with the same email

Shouldn’t happen — the duplicate-email check runs at invite time. If you do end up with two rows, open the newer one and use Revoke & Reinvite to collapse it into the older one.

Where to get help

• Live issues during customer onboarding — message your Adva contact in Slack.
• Feature requests or questions about the platform — file a ticket in the Adva Linear workspace.
• Developer-level detail — see the Admin Playbook (docs/dev-docs/admin-playbook.md in the repository) — the same flow with SQL, curl, and audit schema.

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Last updated: 2026-04-22. Some sections (owner-managed admins, users-on-account drill-down) are being finalized this week — this guide will be updated as they land.