Add people and set user roles and permissions

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Each person in your business gets their own sign-in and one role. The role decides what they can change. Everyone who is active can view the business's data, so roles control edits, not reading.

How to add team members

1. Open People & roles and choose Add team member.
2. For someone new, enter their name, email and a starting password of at least 10 characters. For someone who already has a headoffis account, enter their email and leave the password blank.
3. Choose a role and the locations they work at, then confirm the seat. See Seats and billing.

headoffis does not send invitation emails. Give the person their email and starting password yourself. The minimum is 10 characters, but CISA advises passwords of at least 16 characters, so a longer one is safer. The person gets access once Stripe confirms the payment for their seat.

How to assign roles to employees

1. Open People & roles and find the person in Team members.
2. Choose Edit access next to their name.
3. Pick a new role from the Role list, and change their assigned locations if their work has moved.
4. Choose Save access.

The list shows only roles you are allowed to manage. Edit access is unavailable while a seat request awaits payment, for a person whose role holds permissions yours does not, and, unless you are an owner, for your own account.

Built-in roles

Owner, Admin, Manager, Assistant manager and Employee are built in. Each preset maps to a common job in a store:

• Owner and Admin: every permission. Only owners can manage ownership.
• Manager: everything except managing team members, custom roles, workspace settings and restoring data. This preset covers the usual store manager permissions, including approving planograms.
• Assistant manager: products and fixtures, suppliers, customers, editing planograms, store checklists, work, store maps, inventory and sales, and workflows. An assistant manager can prepare a planogram but not approve it.
• Employee: completing store checklists and updating work assigned to them.

Create custom user roles

1. In People & roles, choose New role.
2. Give the role a name of up to 60 characters.
3. Tick the permissions it needs. Each one is listed with a short description.
4. Choose Save role.

Permissions cover the catalog, layouts, approvals, checklists, work, maps, inventory and sales, suppliers, customers, workflows, settings, restore, people and roles. Read-only access is included in every role, so a role with no permissions ticked can view the business but change nothing. Approving planograms requires the permission to edit them as well. A role can be deleted only when no one is assigned to it.

Why roles instead of individual settings

This model is a form of role based access control: permissions attach to a role, and people receive a role. When a job changes, you edit one role instead of every person who holds it. NIST describes the approach as a way to manage access by job function across an organization.

Pair it with the principle of least privilege, which NIST defines as restricting each user to the minimum access needed for their assigned tasks. In practice, start a new hire on Employee and move them up when their duties grow.

Good to know

• Roles apply across the whole business. Location assignments organize work; they do not limit what someone can see.
• Every active member can view and export the business's operational data.
• No one can grant a permission they do not have, and only an owner can change their own access.
• The last active owner cannot be removed.

Common questions

Should employees share a login?

No. A shared sign-in gives everyone the same role, so you cannot stop one person from making changes meant for another. Removing one person would mean changing the password for everyone else. Give each person their own account.

How to set up user permissions for a part-time stock clerk

Add them with the Employee role and tick the store where they work. They can tick off placements on approved checklists and update the work assigned to them. They cannot change products, layouts or stock counts until you give them a role that allows it.

What do staff access levels look like in a small store?

As a worked example, take a business with two stores. The owner keeps Owner. Each store's lead gets Manager so they can approve layouts. A shift supervisor gets Assistant manager to count stock and prepare planograms, and everyone else on the floor gets Employee. If a supervisor should record sales but not edit planograms, create a custom role with only those permissions.

Coming soon

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