Roles & permissions
What each role can open, do, and see — including who gets to see the money.
Every person in a workspace has one role. The role decides which tabs they can open, what they can do, and whose time and money they can see. Tune every role from Settings → Roles & permissions.
Editing roles is reserved for owners and admins — it isn't a permission that can be handed to another role, since anyone who could edit the matrix could grant themselves everything. If Roles & permissions isn't in your settings, your role can't change permissions — which is itself working as intended.
The roles
| Role | In short |
|---|---|
| Owner | Full control of the workspace |
| Admin | Runs the workspace day to day |
| Manager | Leads a team; sees and edits their team's time, and plans their capacity |
| Member | Tracks their own work |
| Viewer | Read-only — a stakeholder who watches progress. Free (doesn't use a seat) |
A Viewer is for the person who needs to see the work — a client-side leader, an exec, or an internal analyst — but not do it. Because they're free, they're read-only by design: they see the Hours, Engagements, Clients & projects, Tasks, and People tabs (landing on Hours), and the permissions that log time or manage the workspace can't be switched on for them (see below). The Track and Timesheet tabs — which exist to log and submit time — are hidden for viewers, who never log time, and in Settings a viewer sees their Profile and a trimmed Notifications page to manage any reports emailed to them. The one power you can hand a viewer beyond seeing is Export — for the analyst who needs the numbers out — as long as they can also see all of it.
A Member tracks their own work and sees every tab except Mileage, which starts off. That's deliberate: logging travel rides on the Mileage tab, so turning it off removes the ability to log a drive — from the tab, the entry editor, and the calendar — not just the screen. Turn Mileage on for the Member role (or one person) to give travel back. A member also has no billing access by default, so money-heavy tabs adapt rather than disappear — Engagements shows budget and pace in hours (never dollars), the same way Hours drops its money columns.
The Mileage tab isn't just a screen — it's the switch for logging travel anywhere. With it off, a person can still track time normally; they just can't attach a drive to an entry or log mileage. Turn it back on from the role's tabs above.
Three things a role controls
Which features show up for them at all — turn one off and it disappears from their sidebar.
The permissions below — managing clients, inviting people, seeing money, exporting.
None, their own, their team's, or everyone's — set separately for viewing and editing.
What they can do — the permissions
Eight switches, set per role in Settings → Workspace → Roles & permissions. Here's what each does and where it starts:
| Permission | What it allows | Owner | Admin | Manager | Member | Viewer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Track their own time | Log their own time | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Edit clients & projects | Create, edit, and delete clients, projects, engagements | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Share clients & projects | Give teammates access to clients & projects (incl. outside collaborators) and appoint Project Managers — who can reach which work, staying inside the workspace. On by default for Managers, but for a manager it's scoped to the work they run or can see (they can't re-wire the whole workspace or appoint a manager — that stays an admin action) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — | — |
| See everything in the workspace | Every client, project, and person — not just work shared with them | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Export all workspace data | Download everything as Excel or JSON (needs See everything in the workspace) | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Share with clients & guests | Send work out of the workspace — create public share links, and email reports to any typed-in address. (A manager can email the team & client contacts already on a project they run without this — see below.) | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Invite & remove people | Send invites, assign roles, deactivate or remove them — who's in the workspace. Capped at your own role: you can only invite, move, deactivate, or remove people at or below it, and only an owner makes (or unmakes) an owner. Also makes the Capacity tab workspace-wide for a manager (otherwise they plan their own team) | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — |
| See billing | Billable, bill rates, invoices, and each engagement's revenue and effective rate | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — | — |
| See costs & profit | Cost rates, expenses, profit, and margin | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — |
Most rows are editable — an admin can give a manager exports, or take billing away. Two rows are fixed. The Owner row is all-on, so a workspace always has someone who can do everything. The Viewer row is the opposite: because a viewer is free (they don't count toward your bill), the permissions that log time or change the workspace — Track their own time, Edit clients & projects, Invite & remove people, Share clients & projects, Share with clients & guests, Connect external integrations, and bulk edits — stay off, and a viewer can never be given the power to edit anyone's time. What you can grant is seeing and taking data out: the See switches (billing, costs, everything in the workspace), Export all workspace data, and the view time scope — a viewer is meant to see.
Export all workspace data also needs See everything in the workspace: the file contains everyone's time, so exporting can't become a way around what you can see on screen.
Billing is scoped to what you can reach. Even with See billing, money figures — like the Profitability report — cover only the clients and projects that person has access to, not the whole workspace. See everything in the workspace widens that to everything. So a manager with billing sees the numbers for their own clients, and an admin (who has both) sees them all.
Rates on a client or project. Anyone with See billing can open the Rates tab on a client or project and see the bill rates there; See costs adds the cost column. Setting bill rates is open to owners and admins anywhere, and to a manager on the clients and projects they manage — so a manager can price their own work. Cost rates are only ever set by owners and admins. Like everything else money, the rates shown are scoped to the clients and projects that person can access.
A viewer never uses a seat, so keeping them read-only is what makes that safe. If you need someone to log their own time or manage anything, give them the Member role (or higher) — that's a billable seat. This is the answer to "I gave my viewer Track time but it won't stick": it's fixed off on purpose.
Whose time — the four scopes
The third control has four levels, set separately for viewing and editing (edit has no "own"):
| Scope | Reaches |
|---|---|
| None | Nobody's time but the app basics |
| Own | Only their own time (view only) |
| Team | The teams they manage |
| All | Everyone in the workspace |
Override tabs for one person
Beyond the role defaults, you can override which tabs a single person sees from their row on the Team page — handy when one member needs (or shouldn't have) a feature the rest of their role does.
Seeing billing (revenue, bill rates) and seeing costs (cost rates, profit, margin) are separate switches, so you can hand someone revenue without exposing what people are paid. A manager starts with billing but not costs — see the table above for where every role begins.
This is usually the answer to "why can't my teammate see money columns on reports or engagements?" See costs is the deliberate "may see compensation" grant — give it to a manager and they'll see cost and margin including per person (their cost rate, and the by-person view on Profitability), scoped to the clients and projects they can reach. So hand it out only to people who should see what others are paid. Setting cost rates still never leaves owners and admins, whoever can see them.
Pick a role on the screen to see exactly what it can reach, in plain language, with financial visibility called out on its own.
Project managers
Not everyone who runs a project should run the whole workspace. A project manager manages a single client or project — with no workspace-wide admin power. You make someone one by giving them management of a specific client or project, and they can then do everything on that work: On the Capacity tab they see the engagements on those projects, staff them, and adjust their pace.
- Edit, archive, and delete it
- Set up and edit its engagements
- Manage its people — grant and revoke who's on it, and staff them on the plan (book their hours on its engagement, right from the People tab)
- Set its bill rates, and assign its tasks
What they don't get is anything workspace-wide: timesheet approval, seeing every client, managing members, or touching work they don't manage. Setting cost rates stays with owners and admins, as everywhere.
From Clients & projects, open the one you want and go to its People tab.
Next to someone who already has access, turn on Manages this (the crown). They're now its project manager — turn it off to hand management back. You can do the same from the other side: open the person on the Team page and flip Manage on any client or project they're on.
Only an owner or admin can turn on Manages this (appointing a manager is an unscoped action). A project manager can add and remove collaborators on the work they run, but can't mint another manager, and can't move a project to a different client. A Viewer can never be a manager — they're read-only and free; make them a Member first. Demoting a project manager to Viewer automatically drops their management and time-logging on shared work (their access to see it stays), so read-only really means read-only.
Manage a client and you manage every project under it. Manage a single project and your control stops there.
Managing a client or project already lets its manager schedule a report to that work's team and client contacts — no Share with clients & guests needed, because the recipients are the people already on the project. What still takes Share with clients & guests is sending out of the workspace by other means: typing in an arbitrary email address, or creating a public share link. That power can also be handed to a manager one project at a time — see the Allow external sharing toggle below. So a project lead can keep their client updated without an admin being the one to press send.
On a Project Manager, an owner or admin can turn on Allow external sharing (the toggle sits under the crown on the client or project's People tab). It lets that manager email reports to any typed-in address and create public share links — but only for the client or project they run, nothing else. Only an owner or admin can flip it, so a manager can never hand themselves (or a teammate) this power; a manager just sees whether it's on. Turning it off, or removing their manager role, removes the ability. Use it when a project lead should own client delivery end to end without the whole Share with clients & guests permission.
Bring people in and assign them a role.