Permissions and User Management

A permissions system resolves a tension present in every company: management does not want anyone changing the logo or the company address, and employees do not want to wait a week to fix a typo in their own bio. The answer is not concentrating every permission in one person — that makes data go stale, because whoever notices an error cannot fix it — but distributing by role: an owner who holds everything, an admin who runs the company and its team, a manager scoped to their own department or branch, and a member who edits only their own details. Four levels cover most small and mid-sized organisations.

The four roles

Owner: the highest level. Creates and owns the company, sets identity and templates, manages the subscription and billing, and adds or removes admins. Usually the business owner or their formal delegate.

Admin: runs the company day to day. Sets company, branch and department details, adds and deactivates employees, and sees everyone's figures. Cannot dispose of account ownership itself.

Manager: permissions scoped to their area — their department or branch. Edits what they oversee, manages its members, and sees their numbers. Cannot see or edit other departments. This role is what lets multi-branch companies operate without choking at the centre.

Member: edits their own details only — photo, bio, direct number. Not the logo, the colours, the company address, or anyone else's data.

The rule that assigns permissions correctly

The practical rule that settles most cases: whoever notices an error should be able to fix it.

Photo by Atlantic Money on Unsplash

The employee notices a mistake in their title, so let them fix it. The branch manager knows their branch's number changed, so let them update it. Management decides to change the identity, so let them hold that alone.

The arrangement that always fails is concentrating everything centrally "for discipline". The effect is precisely the reverse: data goes stale, because whoever sees the error waits and whoever can fix it never sees it. Two months later everyone has grown used to incorrect data.

What is never delegated

Conversely, some permissions are not distributed regardless of company size:

Visual identity: logo and colours. Distributing this means ten versions of your identity within a year.

Account ownership: who owns the company itself — a matter that should be clear in writing.

Subscription and billing: a financial permission that stays with the owner.

Creating and deactivating users: this controls who represents the company, and is never left open.

Shared data: the official address, registration details, and main numbers.

The most damaging mistake: a card on a personal account

This error is administrative rather than technical, and its effect surfaces late, once fixing it has become expensive.

An employee creates a card carrying the company logo and office number on their personal account, then leaves. The card stays under their sole control: nobody in the company can edit it, disable it, or even see what is on it.

The result is a link published on company materials and email signatures pointing at a page the company does not own. A year can pass before anyone notices.

The correct rule: work cards are created under the company account, and the employee is granted permission to edit their details on them without owning them. Their personal card, in their own name, stays with them and moves with them — which is their right.

Settle this on day one. Correcting it a year later means recreating links and changing everything they were printed on.

When an employee leaves

This is the moment that tests your whole permissions setup.

Remove access first: account access is revoked the same day, not the following week.

Decide the fate of their page: disable it, or better, redirect it to whoever replaced them. A client opening the old link reaches someone who can help instead of a dead end, and the relationship stays with the company.

Review what they managed: if they were a department manager, who runs it now? A department with no manager quietly stops being updated.

Do not delete data immediately. Deleting loses a record you may need; deactivating is sufficient and reversible.

Make these steps part of your written offboarding process, alongside returning equipment and closing email. An unwritten step is always forgotten.

Numbers: who sees whose?

An aspect of permissions overlooked despite its sensitivity: visibility of data, not just the ability to edit it.

An employee sees their own page's figures: how many opens, which buttons. They use that to improve their own work and time their follow-ups.

A manager sees their members' figures to compare and help, and does not see other departments.

Administration sees everyone.

The important rule here is that numbers are an improvement tool, not a daily accounting instrument. An employee who feels every movement on their page is being tallied against them stops taking initiative, and may start inflating their figures by opening their own page — at which point the number loses its meaning and everybody loses the benefit.

Reading these figures properly is covered in analytics: what the numbers tell you.

Cases the standard structure does not cover

Four roles suffice for most companies, but some situations need an additional decision.

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Someone working across two branches. Do not assign them arbitrarily; give them permission in both if they genuinely work in both, and have their card show the branch where they spend most of their time.

An external collaborator. A designer or marketer working with you temporarily needs limited, temporary access, with a reminder to remove it when the engagement ends. Temporary access that gets forgotten becomes permanent.

A partner or investor. They may need visibility without editing. If no ready-made role does that, the nearest solution is an administrative role with a clear agreement about what is not touched.

Someone managing more than one company — an owner of several businesses, or an agency running clients' accounts. Here, clean separation between companies matters more than permissions within each.

Periodic review

In companies with staff turnover, unused permissions accumulate: someone who moved departments and kept their old access, or a former manager who still sees figures for a team they no longer run.

Review the user list every six months and ask two questions of each name: do they still work here? and do they still need this permission?

That review takes fifteen minutes in a mid-sized company and prevents the most common situation: a user list that no longer resembles the actual team.

Permissions are not about trust

Worth stating plainly, because it causes friction in small teams.

Limiting an employee's permissions is not a comment on their integrity. It is about reducing the chance of an accidental mistake, not preventing bad intent. Someone with permission to edit the identity may change a colour in good faith and break the consistency of twenty cards, meaning no harm at all.

Wording changes how a team receives it: "everyone owns their own details" lands better than "you can only edit your own details". Same meaning, different effect.

And in very small companies — three or four people — simpler is better: one owner and members. Do not build an elaborate permission structure for a team sharing one room.

Where to start

First: define the owner clearly, preferably an account in the company's name rather than an individual who may leave.

Second: add at least one admin besides the owner. An account only one person can reach is a genuine operational risk if they travel or become unavailable.

Third: add employees as members, and promote those who need it to manager, scoped by department or branch.

Fourth: write down who holds what in a simple file. Verbal agreements about permissions are forgotten within six months.

Structuring branches is covered in managing branches and departments, and standardising team cards in NFC cards for teams and employees.

With AurCard you manage your company's users with defined roles, so each person edits what belongs to them without touching what does not.