If you or a colleague is having trouble logging in to PICS, there are a couple of reasons that this could be:

1. They don’t have an account in PICS at all

2. They have an account in PICS but they are using the wrong username

3. They have an account in PICS but their password is wrong

Try this first

In all cases, the best thing to try first is the forgot password process in PICS.

• Go to the PICS login page

• Click “Forgot your password?”

• Enter your email address and click submit

• You will be shown a message telling you to check your email. Note: For security reasons, we can not say "User Not Found", so you will always see this same message, even if we didn't find your user account.

• Check your email. If we found your user account, you will have an email from PICS with a link to Reset Password. Click this link and follow the prompts to set your new password and then log in to PICS.

If you did not receive an email, you will need to move on to the following steps, which will need the help of a colleague who has Database Administrator permissions for PICS.

If you did get an email, but even after following the process you can still not log in, then you should refer to the process below for using the wrong username.

Note: The following processes can only be done by a user with the Database Administrator permission.

When the person doesn't have a user account for PICS at all

In the Users and Permissions section, search for the user who can't log in and if you can’t find them, then they don’t have a user account.

To create a user account for them, you must first create an Officer record and ensure the officer has their email address set. We require an email address because we will automatically send them an email with a link to set their password when we create the user.

When you create a user in PICS we will use their email address as their username too.

After creating or confirming that they have an officer record, you can then use the Create button in the Users and Permissions section to turn their officer record into a user account.

This will send the new user an email with a link to set their password and log in.

You will then need to set up their PICS permissions.

When the person has a user account in PICS but they are using the wrong username

You find the user in PICS, you can check what their username is in PICS. Many users in PICS databases on hosting will have their PICS Username set to their hosting username. But many also will not.

In PICS, open the user’s summary screen and on the left-hand details section you will see what their PICS Username is:

Open

Confirm that this is the username that the user is attempting to log in with.

They have an account in PICS but their password is wrong

If the username that the user is using is correct then it is their password that is wrong. They are probably trying to use their Hosting Password, but this will not always work in PICS (see below about setting hosting password into PICS password).

The user will need to perform a Forgot Password process as described in Try this First above. If they didn’t receive an email, then a user with database administrator permissions in PICS can check their user profile to see what their Email address is in their PICS record. If the email is blank, it will look like this in PICS:

Open

In this case, the database administrator user should edit the record and enter the user's email address. After doing this, the user can try to perform Forgot Password again and it should work.

Setting Hosting Password into PICS Password

PICS passwords will sometimes, but not always, be the same as the hosting password.

When a user logs in to the hosting portal and runs desktop PICS, then logs in to PICS using their hosting portal username and password, their PICS password will be replaced with their hosting password.

Because of this, users who log in to both PICS and PICSDesktop could get themselves into a mix up if they change their PICS password to something different than the password they use for hosting portal.

We would recommend that if the user is using PICS desktop and PICS that they set their PICS password to the same password that they use for the hosting portal when they perform the forgot password process in PICS.