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HousingSurveyPRO

The eight roles, and what each can do

Who can do thisPermission: members ≥ 1

There are eight roles, each with a fixed set of capabilities enforced on the server — not just hidden buttons in the portal.

What it is

Role What it can do
Owner Everything org-admin has, plus the two irreversible actions: deleting the organisation and transferring ownership. Exactly one person per organisation.
Org-admin Everything except deleting the organisation or transferring ownership — settings, billing, members, integrations, evidence, work orders.
Manager Operational: work orders, scheduling, evidence read/export, case notes, and resetting a non-admin colleague’s credentials. No settings, billing, API keys, or inviting/removing members.
Coordinator Office staff below manager: raises work orders, schedules visits, keeps case notes, reads evidence and dashboards. No evidence export, and no properties, members, settings or billing access at all.
Finance Billing and invoices only, plus read-only dashboards. Nothing else.
Viewer Read-only evidence and dashboards. Nothing else.
Surveyor App-only — no portal capabilities at all; access to evidence, properties, work orders and scheduling is limited to their own assigned jobs.
Operative App-only, works-mode only — the same empty portal capability set as surveyor, scoped to assigned work orders and scheduling only.

How to do it

  1. Open Settings → Members & seats and, when inviting or changing someone’s role, read each role’s plain-English capability list on the picker itself — it’s generated directly from the same matrix enforced server-side, so it can never drift from what the role actually grants.
  2. Choose the narrowest role that covers what the person actually needs — coordinator rather than manager for someone who shouldn’t export evidence, for instance.
  3. Use Granular permissions afterwards for the rare case where one specific person needs a module’s access adjusted beyond their role’s baseline.

How it integrates

Every capability check on the server resolves the caller’s role from their access claims, never from anything the client sends — a role change here takes effect the moment the person’s session next refreshes. Owner and org-admin are the only roles that can invite, remove or change someone else’s role at all; manager additionally gets the narrower ability to reset a non-admin colleague’s password or email without full member-management rights. The 11-module granular permission system layers on top of every role here — a role is a baseline, not a ceiling on what a specific person can be granted (see Granular permissions).

Common problems

  • I was told this platform has three roles — surveyors, managers, org-admins. That’s out of date; there are eight, with a materially different capability set each, especially coordinator and finance.
  • A manager can’t invite anyone. Correct — manager has read access to the member list, not the ability to add, remove or change roles; that needs org-admin or owner.
  • I want someone to see billing but nothing else. That’s exactly what Finance is for — billing and invoices read-write, plus dashboards, and nothing operational at all.