# Article Name 3 Ways to Remove Users from Smartsheet # Article Summary Explore three ways to remove users from Smartsheet, outlining options to manage access and keep your workspace membership current # Original HTML URL on Toriihq.com https://www.toriihq.com/articles/how-to-remove-user-smartsheet # Details Keeping Smartsheet access tidy is a constant chore. People change teams, contractors roll off, and you need to remove users without disrupting work, ownership, or automations. This guide walks through three practical options: remove someone from your Smartsheet account, revoke workspace membership, or unshare specific sheets and folders. You’ll see when to use each, what it affects, and how it impacts permissions and ownership, so your workspace stays current and secure. ## Use Smartsheet's UI Here, you’ll use the Smartsheet UI to remove someone from your plan and hand off anything they own. Smartsheet’s help docs call this out in the Admin Center under User Management. ### Check your role You need to be a System Admin to remove users. If you don’t see Admin Center in Smartsheet, ask one of your admins to run the steps. ### Open User Management in Admin Center - In Smartsheet, select your profile icon in the upper right. - Choose Admin Center. - Go to User Management. ### Decide: deactivate or remove Smartsheet’s “Remove, deactivate, or reactivate users” help doc explains the difference: - Deactivate: Blocks sign-in and frees the license, but the person still exists on your account for record-keeping. - Remove from account: Fully removes them from your plan. You’ll transfer ownership of their items during this process. If you want them completely off the account, choose remove. ### Remove the user and transfer ownership - Find the user in the list. Use search if needed. - Open the three-dot menu next to their name. - Select Remove from account. - In the transfer prompt, pick a new owner. Smartsheet will move anything they own to that person: - Sheets, reports, and dashboards - Workspaces they own - Sharing and permissions stay as-is; only ownership changes - Confirm the removal. A few notes while you’re here: - If the user owned a lot of items, the transfer can take a bit. That’s normal. - The new owner gets notified, so they can review what moved over. ### Double-check automations and alerts After the transfer, open a couple of the key sheets that moved: - Check automation rules and scheduled workflows to make sure they still run as expected. - Update any “Send from” or “Request from” settings if they referenced the removed user. ### If you only need to block access for now - In the same three-dot menu, choose Deactivate instead of Remove. - You can reactivate later from the same spot. ### If the person isn’t on your account If you can’t find them in User Management, they’re likely an external collaborator. They aren’t a managed user on your plan. To cut off access, unshare them: - Open the sheet or workspace they’re on. - Manage sharing and remove their email. That’s it. The core flow above is the same one Smartsheet describes in their Admin Center and user removal help articles. ## Use Torii Instead of working inside Smartsheet itself, you can use Torii [https://www.toriihq.com/], a SaaS Management Platform, to remove user in Smartsheet. SMPs centralize management of your SaaS tools and integrations, allowing you to programmatically onboard/offboard users, view subscription details, and more-all from one place. With Torii, you replace Smartsheet’s manual steps with automation that runs whenever a trigger occurs. Triggers might include a new hire, an employee departure, a contract renewal, and similar events. If you repeat this task often, automation can save significant time. To remove user in Smartsheet via Torii, follow these steps: ### 1. Sign up for Torii Contact Torii [https://www.toriihq.com/], and ask for your free two-week proof-of-concept. ### 2. Connect your Smartsheet account to Torii After your Torii account is active, connect Smartsheet to Torii (assuming you already have a Smartsheet account). Here are the instructions for the Smartsheet integration [https://support.toriihq.com/hc/en-us/articles/5198770970139]. ### 3. Create a Torii workflow for Smartsheet In Torii, build an automated workflow to remove user in Smartsheet. Go to the Workflows tab, define a trigger, then add an action that removes the user in Smartsheet. From that point on, whenever the trigger fires, Smartsheet will be updated automatically. ## Use Smartsheet's API Use Smartsheet’s API to remove a user Here, you’ll remove a user from your Smartsheet organization using the Smartsheet API. You’ll grab their user ID, choose how to handle their items, and call the delete endpoint. ### Get the user’s ID You need the numeric userId for the API call. Example curl is: - Scan the response for the person you want to remove and note their id. - If you prefer to filter locally, you can pipe the output to a tool like jq: ### Decide what should happen to their items Smartsheet lets you transfer ownership of the departing user’s items and remove them from all shares in one step. The API docs describe these query parameters on the delete call. - There are two things to decide: - Who should receive ownership of the user’s items: - Set transferTo to the recipient’s userId. - How to handle sharing: - Set removeFromSharing to true to strip the user from all shared items they don’t own. - Optional notification: - Control emails with sendEmail=true or false. Notes: - If the user owns items, you must use transferTo or the call can fail. - Pick a recipient who has access to the relevant workspaces, or they may not see transferred items. ### Remove the user with the API Use DELETE /users/{userId} with the query parameters you chose. Example curl is: - If the user does not own any items and you do not need to transfer ownership, you can omit transferTo: ### Confirm the removal You can confirm by fetching the user or listing users again. Example curl is: - A 404 Not Found means the user has been removed. - Or list users and make sure their id is gone: ### Handle common errors - 400 Bad Request: - Often appears if the user owns items and you didn’t provide transferTo. - 403 Forbidden: - Your token lacks the required admin scopes or you are not an account admin. - 404 Not Found: - The userId doesn’t exist in your organization. - 429 Too Many Requests: - You hit rate limits. Retry with backoff.