Who can see and edit an Object

An Object is a kind of record your team defines, such as Repairs or Sample requests, and every Object carries its own settings for who can do what with it. Objects themselves are built in Settings › Objects, which What is an Object? introduces. The dials that decide who can see and edit them sit further down the same menu, on Settings › Permissions, and this page is how you set them.

Your repairs can be open to everyone while your supplier terms are limited to leads, and neither decision affects the other. Creating an Object sets these up for you, so you only come here when the defaults are not what you want. That is usually the moment you add something the whole workspace should not be reading.

Before you start

These dials live on Settings › Permissions, which only admins can see. Roles rank from member, to lead, to admin, and are set per person in Settings › Members. How to work out who can do what in your workspace is the wider explanation of how a person's role turns into what appears on their screen.

Where do you set who can do what?

On Settings › Permissions. Each row is one action, with three buttons across it: admin, lead and member. Pick the lowest role allowed to do that thing.

Choosing member means everyone, choosing lead means leads and admins, choosing admin means admins only. Each change saves the moment you click it.

Your own Objects are listed by name, so a Repairs Object at Fairgreen Golf Co. gives you four rows reading Repairs · View, Repairs · Create, Repairs · Update and Repairs · Archive.

What do the four dials do?

They cover the four things a person can do with an Object, and they are independent of each other.

• View decides who sees the Object at all. It controls the list in the sidebar and the records inside it. Someone below this role does not see a locked screen; the whole thing is simply not there for them.
• Create decides who can add a new record. It is what puts the Object in the new-record menu.
• Update decides who can change a record's fields, move it through the stages set up in The stages a record moves through, and set its owner.
• Archive decides who can take a record out of the working list.

A new Object opens View, Create and Update to every member, and limits Archive to leads. That suits most operational Objects. Tighten View first if the Object holds anything commercially sensitive, since the other three sit behind it in practice.

Which role should each dial be set to?

Start from who needs to act on the records, not from who might be curious about them. Two patterns cover most of what a brand needs.

Open to work on, tighter to tidy up. Leave View, Create and Update on member, and put Archive on lead. Fairgreen's Repairs Object works this way: anyone in customer service logs a repair and moves it along, but only a lead retires one. This is the shape most Objects want.

Visible to a few. Put View on lead when the Object holds costs, margins or supplier terms. Nobody below lead sees the sidebar entry or the records inside it. Use it deliberately, because an Object nobody can see is an Object nobody updates.

Every dial is one of those three answers, so if a setting feels like it needs to be finer than that, the information underneath it usually belongs on a separate Object with its own View dial.

Decide what belongs on an Object everyone can see

Everyone who can view an Object sees every field on it. Plan the Object around that, because it is the one thing on this page that a sketch fixes and a setting cannot.

In practice, that means:

• Keep a figure the whole workspace should not read on an Object with a tighter View dial, rather than as one more field on an open one. Fairgreen's factory unit costs sit on suppliers, not on the Sample requests records that the marketing team opens every day.
• Treat files the same way. A file attached to a record is visible to everyone who can open that record, so a signed contract belongs on an Object limited to leads.
• Split rather than squeeze. Two linked Objects, one open and one restricted, give you a clean answer that a single wide Object cannot. Link one Object to another covers joining them up.

Plan your fields before you add them is the page to read before you build, and it is short. This is the decision it exists for.

How do the built-in records work here?

They appear on the same screen, with the same three buttons. Ten of them carry their own View dial: customers, decisions, inventory levels, orders, products, purchase orders, suppliers, variants, wholesale accounts and wholesale orders. Purchase orders, suppliers, wholesale accounts and wholesale orders also carry an Update dial, so you can let a coordinator write a purchase order while keeping supplier terms with the leads.

Two things about that list are worth knowing:

• The records that mirror your Shopify store, which are customers, orders, products, inventory levels and variants, carry a View dial only. They are kept in step with your store.
• A few are open to everyone in the workspace by design and have no row here: tasks, campaigns, members and callbacks.

Decide between a built-in record and your own Object covers which one to reach for when you are adding something new.

Why is something still blocked?

Four answers cover almost every case, and each names its own fix.

• Settings itself is admin only. A workspace-wide Define Objects row governs the whole of Settings › Objects. Granting it to a lead does not let them in, because everything under Settings needs the admin role as well.
• The change has not reached an open screen. A dial applies from the next time a page is loaded. Ask anyone already looking at the record to refresh.
• A calculated field is refused. A field that reads a value across a link will not save if it would carry that value from a more restricted Object onto a more open one. The message names the row to change on this screen. A field that works itself out has the detail.
• The row says "(archived)". That Object has been retired, and its settings are held for you in case it comes back. See Rename, reorder or retire an Object.

One row can never be lowered: the setting that controls who edits these settings is locked to admin, so a workspace cannot lock itself out. Once the dials are right, everyone else picks up at How to find and open your records.