Permissions & Access Control

Permissions define what a user is allowed to see and do within the system. They operate on top of the Hierarchy and Persona layers — meaning two staff members in the same organization may see entirely different interfaces and capabilities.

How Permissions Work

Every interaction in Business Dash is evaluated against three permission axes:

• Page Visibility — Which pages, sections, or dashboard tabs appear in the navigation and are accessible
• Feature Access — Which capabilities (reports, settings, integrations, etc.) are available
• Data Access Scope — Which subset of organizational data the user can view — all customers, only their assigned customers, nothing, etc.
• Action Controls — Whether the user can create, read, update, delete, or manage specific resources

These axes are evaluated together. A user might see the Customers page (page visibility) but only be able to view records (no create/edit/delete actions) and only for customers assigned to them (scoped data access).

Role-Based Access

Rather than assigning individual permissions to each staff member, permissions are grouped into roles. A role is a named set of permissions with a defined scope.

Common roles include:

• Owner — Full access to all organization data and settings
• Admin — Broad administrative access, may exclude billing or platform settings
• Manager — Department or team-level management permissions
• Staff — Standard operational access appropriate for most team members
• Limited — Read-only or restricted access for specific use cases

Roles are assigned at the Staff level within an organization. The platform layer maintains its own set of administrative roles.

Teams and Departments

Teams and Departments are organizational structures that group staff members for collaboration, reporting, and permission management.

Departments

Departments represent functional areas of the business (Sales, Support, Engineering, Marketing, etc.). They are defined at the organization level and provide:

• Department-scoped data visibility — staff see records belonging to their department
• Department-level analytics and reporting
• Department-specific settings and configuration

Teams

Teams are cross-functional groups that can span departments. They are more flexible than departments and are typically used for:

• Project-based collaboration
• Account assignments (shared customer ownership)
• Temporary initiatives or committees

How Teams and Departments Interact with Personas

Teams and departments exist within the Organization Persona — they are organization-level structures managed by admins. However, they directly influence what a user sees in their User Persona:

• A staff member's department determines which organizational data is visible by default in their personalized view
• Team membership surfaces shared customers, tasks, and projects in the user's dashboard
• Permissions assigned via team/department membership cascade into the User Persona's filtered view

For example: a Support agent in the Support department sees only support-related customer records in their User Persona, while an Account Manager in Sales sees their assigned accounts — both drawing from the same organization data but filtered through their respective team/department permissions.

Permission Evaluation Flow

When a staff member performs an action, the system evaluates permissions in order:

1. Hierarchy — Is this action at the Platform, Organization, or Customer level?
2. Persona — Is the user viewing through the Organization or User persona?
3. Role — What role does the user hold? Does it grant the required permission?
4. Scope — Does the user's team/department membership grant access to this specific record or resource?
5. Action — Does the role allow the specific action (create, read, update, delete, manage)?

If any step denies access, the action is rejected. All steps must pass for the action to proceed.

Permissions Across Hierarchy Levels

Permissions are evaluated differently depending on the hierarchy level:

A user may have permissions at multiple levels simultaneously. Platform administrators who also belong to an organization hold both platform-level and organization-level permissions.

Relationship to Personas

Permissions and Personas work in tandem:

• The Organization Persona surfaces permissions primarily through department and team structures — who can see and manage which parts of the organization
• The User Persona applies those permissions as filters — showing only the data, tasks, and features that the user's role and team memberships grant access to
• The same permission can have different effects depending on which persona the user is currently viewing

This layered approach ensures that permissions are consistently enforced regardless of how the data is being viewed.