This is a common question and we often double check with people what they need prior to actioning. Each has a specific role to play.

User 

This is a physical person in your organisation, they get a username and password and you pay for their license. They should never give their password to anyone else, and the account is connected to their mobile device for two-factor authentication making it hard/impossible to share access. This also means when it comes to onboarding and offboarding, or ensuring correct permissions to your data this can be managed at a detailed human level. Other benefits are being able to send employment-related information, payslips etc to the employee privately.  

To grant access to anything you own you should use the sharing settings on that service. e.g. share a file or folder in Google Drive, grant permissions to your Calendar. For email, if you go on leave or you have a PA who manages your communication you can use Delegation and you do not have to share your password. 

The cost of a user is related to the seat cost on your current plan - you can find this via My Services

Groups - Free

Groups are free, and you can have as many of them as you like. Groups can be used to distribute email to a number of recipients, or communicate internally to a team. Groups can also be used to set permissions in Google Drive or other areas of security to the members of the group - this can save a lot of time managing permissions for users in your organisation.

When thinking about email distribution these are not great for customer facing objectives because no-one in the team knows who has actioned the email. You only see incoming email not outbound. You can however access email via groups.google.com. 

If you need a common inbox to manage requests e.g. customer support then there are two options:

1) a User account configured with Delegation 

• Costs a user license
• Easy to open the familiar gmail interface
• Labels and all other tools are available to organise and create workflow 
• Can't create rules unless you login to the inbox with it's username and password like a real user 
• Can get confusing without defined internal procedures and training

2) Collaborative Inbox on Google Groups 

• Free
• Managed via groups.google.com 
• Labels just like Gmail 
• Conversations can be assigned to a user so ownership of that conversation is very clear 
• Conversations can be marked as complete when done
• Different user levels available to the group members 
• The interface is not as slick as gmail.com 

Aliases - Free

These are common misspellings or alternates to an email address. They do not cost anything to add. e.g. your company poolicy may be to use name.initial e.g. duncan.i@yourdomain.com but you also want duncan.isaksen-loxton@yourdomain.com to work. The latter would be an alias to the user account. 

Aliases can also be added to Groups. 

Aliases can also be domains. This has the benfit that if you run several brands, you can add a second domain name to your account and it can either automatically be added to every user, or you can separate your users so they use that domain only. We can help you decide on how to organise that. One really cool thing about this is that the outside world has no idea, they see whatever you want them to see.