Employees and roles

This page is for the owner and the admin of an organization. They are the only two roles that can create an employee, change one, or take one out of service.

Read it before you decide what role to give someone. The five role names are not a hierarchy of seniority, and three of them cut across the boundary you would expect from their names. Roles and access carries the full capability table; this page explains what each role is like to live in, and how the operations work.

Choosing a role

Start from the job.

The job you are hiring for The role

Runs the organization and is the operator’s point of contact

owner — there is exactly one, and the organization cannot appoint a different one for itself

Looks after the organization: its people, its billing identities, its settings, its connection to the content management system

admin

Sells the inventory: faces, floor prices, price lists, automated guaranteed campaigns, reports

manager

Reviews creatives and nothing else

moderator

Needs to see the numbers without touching anything, possibly only for one billing identity

viewer

If you are unsure between admin and manager, ask whether the person needs to change the organization or only to trade with it. Every commercial screen a manager needs is open to an admin as well, so an admin is a superset — but the reverse is not true, and a manager who is later asked to add a colleague will find no way to do it.

owner

The organization’s top-level account. An owner reaches every screen in the client cabinet.

An organization has exactly one owner, and it has one from the moment it is created — the first employee of a new organization must be the owner, and a second one is refused.

Two things are the owner’s alone:

  • Switching faces on and off in bulk. Where the content management system leaves face activation to the operator, the bulk switch is offered to the owner alone.

  • Immunity from the organization’s admins. An admin can read the owner’s record but cannot change its role, rename it, disable it or reset its password.

The owner cannot change their own role, and cannot disable their own account. Moving the owner role to somebody else is a request to the platform operator; when it is carried out the previous owner becomes a viewer, so if that person is to keep working, their role has to be set again straight afterwards.

Because the owner is singular and cannot be reassigned from inside the organization, an owner account whose holder has left is a real problem. Disable the account and ask the operator to move the owner role before the holder goes.

admin

The organization’s own administrator. The role reaches the organization itself.

An admin holds everything the owner holds, with two exceptions: bulk face activation, and any change to the owner.

In practice an admin is the role that does the setting-up work:

  • creates, edits, enables and disables every other employee;

  • creates positions and decides who sits in them;

  • creates and edits legal entities, attaches faces and viewers to them;

  • edits the organization profile and the organization settings;

  • configures the connection to the content management system and starts a synchronization by hand;

  • reissues the organization’s access token, which requires re-entering their own password;

  • records payments against the organization’s balance.

An admin also has the manager’s whole commercial surface: inventory, prices, price lists, automated guaranteed campaigns, moderation and reports.

manager

The commercial role. A manager runs the selling and touches nothing about the organization itself.

What a manager reaches:

moderator

The role dedicated to creative review, and the narrowest of the five. A moderator is not a supervisor and holds no authority over anyone.

What a moderator reaches:

The audit log, the in-app notification list and the pricing screens are outside the moderator role. Moderators receive the review emails — see Notifications.

viewer

Read-only, and the only role that can be narrowed further.

A viewer reads the organization’s inventory, campaigns, prices, automated guaranteed campaigns, technical requirements and statistics, generates reports, and receives in-app notifications. A viewer writes nothing.

A viewer, and only a viewer, can be attached to one of the organization’s legal entities. Doing so narrows everything they see to the faces attached to that entity, and closes the organization’s balance and its notification list to them. See Narrowing a viewer to one legal entity.

A viewer carries no positions and takes no part in creative review.

Creating an employee

Available to the owner and to an admin.

Adding an employee

  1. Go to Employees and choose Create.

  2. Enter the email address. This is the login. It has to be unique across the whole installation, so a person who already has an account somewhere on the installation needs a second address.

  3. Set an initial password.

  4. Enter the name shown throughout the interface.

  5. Choose the role.

  6. If the role is manager or moderator, choose the positions the person belongs to. The field appears only for those two roles, because only those two can hold a position.

  7. Save.

The new employee is active immediately and can sign in with the password you set. They are subscribed by default to the review emails their role receives — see Notifications.

Creating an employee gives a person access to the organization’s data, so when the request comes by phone or email, confirm who is asking before you create the account. Creating an employee is written to the audit log.

Editing an employee

Available to the owner and to an admin, with the admin’s one exception: an admin cannot edit the owner.

You can change the name, the role, and the positions.

The email address is the login and stays as it is. An employee who needs a different address gets a new account.

Two rules apply whoever you are:

  • Nobody can change their own role. An owner editing their own record, or an admin editing theirs, may change the name but not the role.

  • Nobody inside the organization can set a role to owner. The organization already has one and it is not reassignable from within.

A manager or moderator who is moved to viewer or owner has to have their positions cleared in the same save, because those two roles cannot hold positions.

Taking an employee out of service

To take an employee out of service, disable the account; this keeps every author in the audit log resolvable. A disabled employee cannot sign in, and every session they had open is ended at the moment you disable them. Enabling puts them back exactly as they were, with their role, their positions and their subscriptions intact; when the request to enable an account comes by phone or email, confirm who is asking first.

Disabling and enabling are both written to the audit log.

Two restrictions:

  • Nobody can disable their own account.

  • An admin cannot disable the owner.

A disabled employee still counts as an employee: their name remains in the employee list, in the members of any position they held, and in the audit log.

Resetting a password

An owner or an admin can reset another employee’s password from that employee’s record.

You confirm the reset with your own password. The reset then ends every session that employee has open, so they are signed out wherever they were.

Nobody can reset their own password this way; use Account, which asks for your current password and signs you out of your other sessions.

A password reset gives whoever sets the new password access to the account, so when the request comes by phone or email, confirm who is asking before you reset it.

An admin cannot reset the owner’s password.

Password changes are written to the audit log as the fact of a change.

Permissions

The rule is the one on this page and in Roles and access. A role that is not listed as able to do something cannot do it: the request is refused and nothing changes. When you work out what to give somebody, work from the lists above.

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