Training providers can act in the Portal for the people they train and certify. They can search for people, register them for courses and exams, and view their certifications. Before Rhythm allows those actions, it checks two things: whether the signed-in person can act for the provider, and whether the person they want to help is someone that provider can serve.
Check One: Are You a Provider Administrator?
To act for a training provider, a contact must belong to that provider’s organization and hold the contact role your association marked in Certifications settings as the training-provider administrator role. Both parts matter. A contact from another organization cannot act for the provider, even with the right role, and a contact in the provider’s organization cannot act for it without that role.
One role controls every provider action. Your association cannot let someone search for people without also letting them create contacts, submit applications, and register people for courses and exams. The role allows all provider actions, or it allows none of them.
Tip
If a training provider’s staff member cannot find or act for anyone in the Portal, first confirm that they are linked to a contact in the provider’s organization. Then confirm that the contact holds the role your association marked as the training-provider administrator role in Certifications settings.
Running or viewing provider reports is the one exception. Reports do not require the administrator role or membership in the provider’s organization, even though every other provider action does.
Check Two: Is This Person Served by the Provider?
Passing the first check only means someone can act for a provider in general. Before they can work with a specific person’s record, Rhythm checks whether that person is served by the provider in one of three ways:
- They live in the provider's territory. The person’s contact has at least one address with a state or country that exactly matches a territory assigned to the provider. If the country is spelled differently on the contact than it is in the provider’s territory list, it will not match. Any address on the contact counts, including an old address that no one removed.
- The provider issued or renewed one of their certifications. This applies no matter what status the certification currently has. Access based on this connection lasts as long as the certification record exists, whether the certification is active, expired, or in another status.
- The provider created their contact record itself, specifically through the provider’s contact-creation feature in the Portal. A contact created by your staff, by the person themselves, or through a data import does not carry this connection, even if the provider works with them.
If a provider has no territories assigned, the territory check can never match. That provider can only serve someone through the certification connection or the contact-creation connection.
Warning
If a training provider’s staff member cannot find someone they expect to help, check the exact connection. Living nearby is not enough unless the provider’s territory includes that state or country, and having a certification is not enough unless this specific provider issued or renewed it.
What a Provider Administrator Can Do
Once both checks pass for a specific person, a provider administrator can search for and view that person’s contact details, create a new contact for someone the provider is bringing on, view their certifications and applications, submit or update an application on their behalf, register them for courses and exams, log activities for them, and run reports covering the people the provider serves.
Why You Might Not Find Someone
When a person or record does not meet these checks, Rhythm usually responds as though the person does not exist. Depending on what you were trying to do, you may see a refusal, an empty result, or a general error instead of a message that access was denied. A missing application, in particular, appears as a general error rather than a clear “not found” message.
Turning the Feature On
Provider Portal pages appear in the Portal only when your association has turned on training-provider administration in Certifications settings and the signed-in contact holds the marked administrator role. When administration is turned off, the pages stop and show a message instead of loading. The underlying actions those pages use still run the same checks described above, whether the feature is turned on or off.
A contact who does not have the administrator role but opens a provider page directly by its address still sees the page load. Rhythm refuses the data on the page instead, except on the reports page, which is not guarded by this role in the same way.
Related
For how a provider’s billing status is tracked on the applications and registrations it is connected to, see Training-Provider Billing Status Explained. Contact roles used to mark a training-provider administrator follow the same setup as contact roles generally.