Roles and permissions explained

Sidebar: Team & Payroll, then Roles & Permissions. To change one person, go to Team & Payroll, then Team Members.

To open Roles & Permissions you need the Manage settings permission. Owners always have it. Managers have it unless an owner took it away.

Three layers decide what a person can do.

1. Access level

Every team member is an Employee or a Manager. Owners and co-owners sit above both and always have full access.

The access level is the fallback. If someone has no role, they get the default permissions for their access level.

2. The role

A role is a named set of permissions, such as Groomer, Bather or Front Desk. You build it once and give it to everyone who does that job. When the job changes, you change the role and everyone on it updates.

Every business starts with four roles: Manager, Employee, Front Desk and Kennel Tech. These are marked System role. You can edit them but not delete them.

To create a role:

1. Press Create Role.
2. Enter a Role Name, such as Senior Groomer, and an optional Description.
3. Tick the permissions this job needs.
4. Set Restrict when off-site (see below).
5. Save.

To give someone a role: on Team Members, open the menu on their row, choose Edit Role, and pick the role.

Deleting a custom role puts the people on it back on their access level's defaults.

3. Per-person changes

On Edit Role, Customize Individual Permissions turns a permission on or off for that one person only. Use it for the real exception, like a senior groomer who can also give refunds.

These changes win over the role. If someone has them, Edit Role lists them in a yellow box. Tick Clear these changes to put them back to exactly what their role allows.

Keep these few. A dozen of them means nobody can predict what anyone can do. Make another role instead.

What permissions cover

Permissions are grouped: Clients & Pets, Appointments, Reservations & Boarding, Calendar, Invoicing & Payments, Products & Inventory, Services, Reports & Analytics, Staff & Payroll, Marketing, Settings and Messaging.

Some worth knowing:

• View contact info — without it, staff see only the last 4 digits of a phone number and the email domain.
• Edit own appointments only — a groomer can change their own bookings but not a colleague's.
• Set appointment pricing — without it, staff book at the service's list price.
• Override scheduling conflicts — lets someone double-book on purpose.
• Undo status changes — reverse an accidental check-in, completion, no-show or cancellation.
• Archive & merge clients and Archive & merge pets — history is always kept.
• Issue refunds — separate from taking payments.
• Export reports and Export client & pet contact lists — two separate permissions. The second covers the Client List, the Pet List, and the Export button on the Clients and Pets pages.
• Set up task times & daily walks — boarding task setup, without giving full settings access.
• Manage pay rates — separate from running payroll.

Restrict when off-site

Each role has a Restrict when off-site switch. It only matters if your business turns on Office Access restriction. Then people on that role lose customer details, messages, invoices, checkout, reports and the time clock when they sign in away from the office. See Restricting what employees can do outside the office.

What stays owner-only

No permission gives these away:

• The Alaga subscription (Billing)
• Connecting the card processor and the payout bank account
• Making someone a co-owner, transferring ownership, deleting the business
• Setting your own pay rate

Everything else can be given to a manager, and a new business's Manager role has all of it by default.

When a change does not seem to work

1. Ask the person to reload the page, or sign out and back in.
2. Check Edit Role for per-person changes. They win over the role.
3. Check that the feature is on your plan. A missing plan feature looks like a missing permission.

See I can't see a feature other people can for more.

Nobody can change their own access level or role.