How to work out who can do what in your workspace

Somebody in your Tideswell workspace says a screen has vanished, or a button they used yesterday is gone. Three settings decide what a person can see and do, each on its own admin screen: Settings › Modules, Settings › Permissions and Settings › Members. This page is the order to check them in, written so you can do most of it from what you can already see.

It belongs to Core concepts, the reading section of these docs. Settings › Permissions carries rows for every kind of record, including each Object your team has defined. If that word is new, What is an Object? introduces it; you can follow this page without reading it first.

Before you start

The three screens named here are for admins only. If you cannot see Settings at the foot of the menu down the left, you are not an admin of this workspace.

The diagnosis in the middle of this page is the part meant for you. It needs nothing but the menu and a colleague willing to look at their own screen.

What decides what a person can see?

Three things stack, and all three have to allow something before it appears.

1. Modules decide which parts of Tideswell exist for the whole workspace. An admin switches them on and off in Settings › Modules.
2. Permission rows on Settings › Permissions each name the lowest role allowed to do one thing, such as Create tasks, View suppliers or Approve purchase orders.
3. Your role, member, lead or admin, decides which of those rows you clear.

Read them in that order, because a lower layer cannot rescue a higher one. Say the Purchase orders module is switched off at Fairgreen Golf Co. It does not matter that Priya Raman is an admin: there are no purchase orders in the Buying area for her to open.

One house rule shapes the whole search: hidden rather than locked. Tideswell leaves out what you cannot use instead of showing you a greyed-out version of it.

A non-admin never sees Settings, and an Object you cannot view is not in your Objects area. A few screens you might reach from a link show a short refusal instead, such as "Suppliers access required", with a line telling you to ask an admin.

How does somebody become a lead?

Only two roles are set on a person. In Settings › Members you choose member or admin in the person's Role dropdown, then press Apply on that row. Lead is the third role, and it comes from leading a department.

This surprises every new admin, who goes looking for a lead option in the role dropdown. To make someone a lead:

1. Open Settings › Members and find the person.
2. Open their Departments dropdown.
3. Tick the department and turn on its Lead switch.
4. Press Apply for that department.

The tick and the switch travel together. Press Apply with Lead off only when you mean to step somebody down from leading that team.

When you create a department, the New department dialog has a Team members list as well. Pick someone, then tap Lead beside their name. See How to set up departments.

Where does being a lead count?

It depends on the action. Rows about one department's tasks, projects and milestones count a person as a lead only in the department they lead.

These rows start at lead and work that way:

• Create projects
• Edit, archive and delete projects
• Create, edit and delete milestones
• Delete other people's tasks and comments
• Set tasks to repeat

At Fairgreen Golf Co., Dana leads Production and is an ordinary member in Marketing. She can archive a finished Production project and cannot archive a Marketing one.

Rows about the whole workspace count a lead of any department. Approve purchase orders is one of these: set it to lead and every department's lead can approve, not only the lead of the team that does the buying.

What does being in a department give you?

A home for that team's work, and the chance to lead it. Every department and its projects appear under Work › Departments for everyone in the workspace, whether or not they belong to it.

So when a person cannot open a department's work, their department is not the cause. Work down the checks below instead.

Work out whether it is switched off or not allowed

Do this in order and you will usually know within two minutes. The first step splits the two causes apart, so do not skip it.

1. Ask one colleague to look for the same thing. If nobody in the workspace can see it, a module is switched off. If some people can see it and others cannot, it is permissions.
2. Read what the screen says. A missing row in the menu means the area is hidden from you. A refusal such as "Suppliers access required" names the kind of record you need.
3. Check the person's role in Settings › Members. Remember that the whole Settings area needs the admin role, whatever else is set.
4. Check whether they need to be a lead, and if so, of which department. A great many actions start at lead.
5. Find the action's row on Settings › Permissions and see which role it starts at. Someone can open Selling › Analytics and still be refused Buying › Suppliers, because those are separate rows.
6. If it is a Settings screen, the answer is always the admin role.

A change to somebody's role or departments shows the next time their page loads.

If all three layers look right and the answer is still no, check two more things:

• Which workspace they are in. Everything belongs to exactly one workspace, and a person can belong to more than one. Tideswell glossary defines the term.
• Where they are looking. How to find and open your records covers where records live in the menu.

Change what a role is allowed to do

Open Settings › Permissions. The page reads "The minimum role required for each action. Changes apply immediately." Every action is a row with three columns, admin, lead and member, and you pick the lowest role allowed to do it.

A row saves the moment you click. There is no Save button to press afterwards.

Most rows say plainly what they allow, such as Create projects, Approve purchase orders, View suppliers or Edit bills. Rows for your own Objects read in your words with the action after them: Repairs · View, Repairs · Create, Repairs · Update and Repairs · Archive.

A new Object starts with View, Create and Update open to every member and Archive at lead. That is usually the right shape: everyone logs a repair, and only a lead retires one. How to set who can see and edit an Object covers those rows in full.

Edit these permissions stays at admin. Its other two choices are disabled, and hovering one shows "Locked to admin to prevent lockout". The full list of rows, with where each one starts, is in How to set who can do what.

Why does opening a row not let a lead into Settings?

Because the Settings area is for admins, before any row on the page is consulted. Setting Create channels to lead lets every lead add a channel in Chat. It does not put Settings in front of them.

Say this one plainly to your team: Settings is admins only. Members, permissions, departments, modules, stages, integrations, the audit log, Settings › Objects and every other row in that menu follow the same rule.

To let somebody build or change an Object, give them the admin role rather than a loosened row. See How to choose between a built-in record and your own Object for what building one involves.

Ownership catches people the same way. Owning a record makes you accountable for it and grants you nothing, so never use ownership to hand somebody access. See How to set a record's status and owner.

Who outside your company can see anything?

A supplier's rep, and only if you invite them. From a supplier's page under Buying › Suppliers, the Outside access section lets a lead invite that supplier's rep with Invite their rep.

The rep signs in to a page of their own that lists only that supplier's purchase orders, where they confirm each order. They never see the rest of the workspace. See How to let a supplier's rep confirm their orders.

Three rows control it:

• Invite a supplier or buyer (lead to begin with).
• Remove a supplier or buyer's access (lead).
• See who outside the company has access (member).

Does the Agent get round any of this?

No. The Agent reads your workspace as you, so it answers from what you yourself are allowed to see. Its own section is What is the Agent?.

Opening the panel at all is the Use the agent row, which starts at member.

When the Agent prepares a change, nothing happens until somebody approves it, and the change then runs under that person's name. If you cannot make the change yourself, the card reads "Waiting for someone who can make this change to approve it." See How to approve, refuse or undo a suggested change.

Hand your standing to someone while you are away

The Out of office section of User menu › Account settings lets a colleague cover for you until a date you choose. A handover only ever raises your stand-in to your level, and it does not chain: if Dana covers for Priya and Sam covers for Dana, Sam gets Dana's own standing and never Priya's.

See How to hand over your work while you are away for how to set one up and what your stand-in picks up.

What if a whole Object vanishes for everybody?

It has probably been archived, which looks exactly like a permission problem and is not. An archived Object disappears from the menu and from the new-record menu for everybody, while its rows on Settings › Permissions stay in place marked as archived. See How to rename, reorder or retire an Object.