Access Level Definitions

Sharing in Hoovalu works one item at a time. For every policy and every document in your vault, you decide who can see it — and being in your Circle, by itself, shows someone nothing. There are no tiers, roles, or permission levels to pick between. Either a specific person can open a specific document, or they can't.

Why it works this way

Most families don't want an all-or-nothing vault. You might want your spouse to see everything, an adult child to see your will and nothing about your finances, and your advisor to see only the one policy they manage. Because access is granted per item, you are never choosing between "share everything" and "share nothing."

Joining your Circle shares nothing

When someone accepts your invitation, they become a member of your Circle — and that is all it does. They see none of your policies or documents until you go and share something with them. The invitation itself says so: "Accepting joins your Circle. Nothing is shared automatically."

Your Circle page shows exactly where each member stands. Under their name you'll see a line like "Can see 2 policies · 1 file," or nothing at all if you haven't shared anything with them yet.

Two ways to share

Both routes create the same thing — a grant for one person on one item. Use whichever matches what you're thinking about.

Start from a person. On your Circle page, choose Manage access on a member's row. You'll see a checklist of everything in your vault, split into Policies and Documents, with a box beside each one. Check a box to share that item with that person; leave it unchecked to keep it private. This is the view to use when you're thinking "what should Dana be able to see?"
Start from a document. Open a policy or a file and choose its access option — Update Policy Access or Manage File Access. You'll see your Circle members listed, and you check off the ones who should be able to open this one item. Use this when you're thinking "who should see this?"

If your vault is still empty, the checklist will tell you so: anything you add later can be shared from the same place.

Anything new starts private

A policy or document you add tomorrow is shared with nobody, including people you have already shared a lot with. Sharing is never inherited from a previous grant, from a relationship label, or from how long someone has been in your Circle. If you want a new document seen, you share it deliberately.

Only you can grant or revoke

Sharing is never delegated. Someone you've shared your entire vault with still cannot add, remove, or pass along access to anything — not yours, and not another member's. Every grant and every revoke comes from you, the owner, and only for items you own.

Revoking works the same way as sharing: per item. Uncheck one box and that one document stops being shared. Everything else that person could see stays exactly as it was, and they stay in your Circle.

Relationship labels are not permission levels

When you invite someone you also pick a relationship — Spouse, Child, Parent, Sibling, Friend, or Other. That label is a description of how the person relates to you, and it appears as a small tag on their row. It grants nothing and limits nothing. A Spouse and a Friend both start out seeing nothing at all, until you share something with each of them yourself.

What the other person sees

Everything shared with someone shows up on their Shared page: the policies you've shared, the documents you've shared, and the Circles they belong to. If they're in your Circle but you haven't shared anything yet, that page tells them so honestly — it names your Circle and says nothing has been shared with them yet.

A member can also leave your Circle on their own from that page. If they do, they lose access to everything you'd shared with them.

Removing someone

Removing a member from your Circle ends their access to every policy and document you'd shared with them, immediately and all at once. It is not permanent in the way it sounds: you can invite that person again later. But a reinvite is a clean slate — none of their old access comes back on its own, and you'd check the boxes again for whatever you want them to see this time.

Keep it safe

Because a shared item stays shared until you uncheck it, it's worth opening each member's Manage access checklist now and then to see what they can actually reach — especially after a change in your family, or after you've added several new documents.

What this page used to say

An earlier version of this article described four access levels — None, Read, Modify, and Full Control — applied both to your whole Circle and to individual items, including a level that let another person manage your Circle and add or delete your documents for you. That system was never built into Hoovalu, and this page should not have described it. What is written above is how sharing actually works today.