Roles & Permissions

Beyond the admin and teacher split, a school can define its own staff roles from a dedicated Roles page. Principal, Accountant, Receptionist and anything else you need, each holding exactly the permissions you give it.

System roles

Every school starts with a set of ready-made roles covering common school positions (Owner, School Administrator, Principal, Vice Principal, Academic Coordinator, Class Teacher, Subject Teacher, Accountant, Receptionist, HR Officer, Attendance Officer, Transport Officer and more). These can be renamed and re-permissioned, but not deleted.

Attendance Officer is the narrowest of them, and the one worth knowing about: it holds exactly one permission, take staff roll call, and nothing else at all. It is meant for whoever stands at the gate clocking in the staff who have no phone of their own, and somebody holding it opens the platform onto that single screen. See Roll call.

Custom roles and the permission matrix

A primary admin can create additional roles, duplicate an existing one as a starting point, and choose exactly which permissions each role grants, grouped by module (Attendance, Finance, Students and so on) in a searchable checklist. The Permission matrix view compares every role's grants side by side at a glance.

Finance is granted in three parts

Money is the one area where "can they see it" is rarely one question, so it is three permissions rather than one:

• View invoices: the invoice list, an individual invoice and its PDF, including on a student's own record.
• View payments: the payment list, a receipt and its PDF, the evidence attached to it, and any refunds. A refund goes with the payments because it reverses one.
• View finance: everything that is a summary rather than the ledger itself, so the overview, the outstanding analysis, the reports, the cash-flow statement, and a student's fee status on their profile.

So a registrar who raises bills need not be shown everything the school has banked, and a cashier reconciling receipts need not be shown every family's outstanding balance. Exporting is separate again: Export finance data downloads a list you can already read, never one you cannot.

Nothing changed for any existing role when this split arrived. Every role that could read the two lists still can; the choice only arises the first time you take one of them away.

Assigning roles to staff

Every staff account holds at least one role, chosen when you create it: on the Users page for office accounts, and on the Teachers page for teaching ones, where Subject Teacher is picked for you as the common case. Pick as many as apply: access is the combination of everything each role grants, so a teacher who also runs a homeroom holds both Subject Teacher and Class Teacher rather than needing a third combined role.

To change someone's roles afterwards, either edit them from the page that manages their account, or open a role's detail page here to see and manage everyone who holds it.

Managing roles from your phone

The mobile app carries the same Roles page, under More → School → Roles, for anyone who holds the role-management permission. You can create a role, rename it, change its colour, duplicate one as a starting point, archive or restore it, and delete a custom role nobody holds.

Opening a role gives you two tabs. Permissions is the same searchable, category-by-category checklist as the web, saved in one go, with a count of what the role would grant along the bottom. Staff lists everyone who holds it, with a searchable picker for assigning more; assigning takes effect straight away, so you can hand a role to several people in a row without leaving the list.

Two things stay on the web. The permission matrix, which compares every role side by side, is a grid far wider than a phone screen; open each role instead. And a role's permissions cannot be saved from anywhere by someone who does not hold them themselves, which the app tells you before you start editing rather than when you try to save.

What each person sees

The sidebar, the search bar and the pages themselves all follow the same permissions, so a menu only ever lists pages that person can actually open, with no entry that bounces you back to the dashboard when you follow it. A whole section (Finance, Configuration and so on) disappears when a role can reach nothing inside it, and opening a page's address directly is checked the same way.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• Pages that exist purely to administer something (Teachers, Subjects, Departments) need the matching manage permission, not just the permission to view that data. A teacher can see the staff directory in the places it is used without being offered the page for adding and removing teachers.
• Roles built around one job show a focused portal. An Accountant sees Fees and the people pages their work needs, not the academic ones; a Class Teacher sees their register, grades and report cards. This is a property of the role's permissions, so adjusting a role changes what its holders see immediately.

On the phone

Roles are on the mobile app under More → Roles, and are editable there. Each row gives the role's colour, how many permissions it grants, how many members hold it, and whether it is one of the built-in roles or one your school wrote itself.