Navan User Management Guide

• Model type: role-based
• Description: Navan uses a predefined set of roles (Employee, Admin, Approver, Delegate) assigned per user. Permissions are bundled within each role rather than configured at a granular per-permission level. Admins can assign roles during user creation or edit them afterward.
• Custom roles: No
• Custom roles plan: Not documented
• Granularity: Role-level only; no documented ability to create custom roles or modify individual permissions within a role.

1. Log in to Navan as a Company Admin.
2. Navigate to Company Settings > Users.
3. Click 'Add User' or 'Invite User'.
4. Enter the required user details (first name, last name, work email address).
5. Assign a role (e.g., Employee, Admin, Approver).
6. Optionally assign cost center, department, and manager for approval routing.
7. Click 'Send Invite' or 'Save'; the user receives an email invitation to activate their account.

Required fields: First name, Last name, Work email address

Watch out for:

• Users must activate their account via the emailed invitation before they can book; uninvited or unactivated users cannot access the platform.
• Email domain must match the company's registered domain(s) in Navan; personal email addresses are typically rejected.
• Manager/cost center assignment affects expense approval routing; missing this data can cause approval workflow failures.
• If SCIM provisioning is active, manually added users may conflict with or be overwritten by directory sync.

• Can delete users: Unknown
• Delete/deactivate behavior: Navan's official help documentation describes deactivating users rather than permanently deleting them. Deactivated users lose the ability to log in and book travel but their historical trip and expense data is retained in the system for reporting and audit purposes.

1. Log in to Navan as a Company Admin.
2. Navigate to Company Settings > Users.
3. Locate the user by searching their name or email.
4. Open the user's profile.
5. Select 'Deactivate User' (or equivalent option).
6. Confirm the deactivation when prompted.

Watch out for:

• Open or upcoming travel bookings are not automatically cancelled upon deactivation; admins must manually review and cancel or reassign them.
• Deactivated users may still appear in historical expense reports and approval audit trails.
• If SCIM is enabled, deactivation should be managed from the IdP to avoid sync conflicts; manual deactivation in Navan may be overridden on the next sync cycle.

• Where to check usage: Company Settings > Users (filter by Active status to count active seats)
• How to identify unused seats: Admins can filter the Users list by last login date or activity status to identify employees who have never logged in or have not booked recently. No dedicated 'unused seat' report is documented in official help content.
• Billing notes: The Business plan is free for companies with up to 300 employees; exceeding 300 active users requires upgrading to Enterprise. Enterprise pricing is negotiated per contract. Navan does not publicly document per-seat add-on pricing for the Business tier.

Adding a user requires first name, last name, and a work email matching the company's registered domain; the user then activates via an emailed invitation before gaining platform access.

Skipping cost center or manager assignment at creation is a common source of broken approval routing downstream - expense reports can end up unroutable if the org chart data is missing.

For teams above 300 active employees, the free Business plan no longer applies and an Enterprise contract is required before additional users can be provisioned.

Community evidence is not specific enough to quote or summarize yet for this app.

Manual management is viable for small or infrequently changing teams on the Business plan. Once headcount grows, employee turnover accelerates, or the company moves to Enterprise, the absence of automated deprovisioning becomes a real access-hygiene risk - deactivated users retain historical data visibility and open bookings are not auto-cancelled.

Teams that already run an IdP (Okta, Entra ID, Google Workspace) should evaluate SCIM provisioning, which is gated to Enterprise, to eliminate the manual invite-and-deactivate loop entirely.

Bottom line

Navan's manual user management is straightforward for admins who keep role assignments clean and org chart data current from day one.

The four fixed roles cover most organizational structures, but the lack of granular permission controls means every app user gets the full bundle of permissions tied to their role - there is no middle ground.

The biggest operational risk is deactivation: open bookings survive it, SCIM sync can override it, and invitation emails can miss inboxes entirely, so teams should build a checklist around each offboarding event rather than treating a single deactivation click as sufficient.