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Roles & Permissions

SOPHIE separates two questions that are easy to blur:

  • Roles say what someone does: Front Desk, Provider, Office Manager. Roles decide which Standards and recurring tasks land on a person's My Day, who owns a Standard, and who reports to whom.
  • Access says what someone can see and change in SOPHIE: Super Admin, Admin, Team Member or Guest, plus any custom permissions.

A person can hold several roles and has one access level. Changing one doesn't change the other, so you can give an office manager the right to edit everyone's schedule without making them an Admin.

Roles​

There is one set of roles for the whole practice. Every location uses the same roles, so a role means the same thing wherever someone works. You manage them in Settings › Roles & departments › Roles, which has four views:

  • Hierarchy: your roles as a reporting tree, with how many people hold each one.
  • List View: every role with its parent role and number of people.
  • Reporting Rules: who each role reports to for automatic manager assignment (see Manager relationships).
  • Pods: optional small teams within a department, such as a provider and their assistants. Each pod has a name, an optional description, a department and a color.

Core roles​

Every practice starts with a set of core roles: Practice Owner, Office Manager, a lead for each starting department (Admin Lead, Finance Lead, Marketing Lead, Operations Lead, Sales Lead) and All Staff. You can rename core roles to fit your practice, but you can't delete them.

All Staff is special. Everyone in the practice holds it automatically, so a Standard assigned to All Staff reaches everyone. You never assign it to anyone by hand.

Create roles​

  1. Go to Settings › Roles & departments and click Create role.
  2. In Create Roles, enter a Role Name (for example "Office Manager").
  3. Choose a Parent Role, the role it reports to, or leave it at None (Top Level). The department and the role's place in the hierarchy are filled in from the parent.
  4. Click Add Role to add more rows if you're creating several at once.
  5. Click Create role (or Create 3 roles).

Edit a role​

In the Hierarchy or List View, click Edit on a role. In Edit Role you can change:

  • Role Name and Description
  • Reports To: its parent role in the hierarchy
  • Hierarchy Depth: how far down the tree it sits. It must be deeper than its parent. 0 is the top level.
  • Can approve workflows
  • Management role: marks the role as a leadership position. Holders can look at their team members' My Day, and SOPHIE counts them as managers for notifications.
  • Departments: the department or departments the role belongs to (see Departments)

The Office Manager always reports to the Practice Owner, and a role can't report to itself through a loop.

Delete a role​

  1. Click Delete on the role.
  2. In Delete Role, choose a role under Reassign users & SOPs to. SOPHIE moves everyone who holds the role, plus every Standard assignment, Standard ownership, Standard schedule and Scoreboard metric that uses it, onto the role you pick.
  3. Click Delete Role.

If the role has child roles, SOPHIE lists them under Child Roles Found:. Delete or reassign those first.

You can also rename or delete a role from the org chart on Team › People: click Edit, then use Edit Role or Delete Role in a role card's ⋯ menu. Deleting there doesn't reassign anything. If the role is still in use, you'll see where, and Delete anyway removes it from those Standards and people.

Role assignments​

A person's roles decide what work reaches them, so keep them current.

  • Settings › People & access: open the person's panel. Under Roles, use Add a role or the remove button, then Save changes. Everyone needs at least one role.
  • Team › People: click Edit, then use Add Member in a role card's ⋯ menu to put someone in that role, or Edit User to change all of their roles at once.

A role assignment counts at the locations the person works at. When you remove a role from someone, SOPHIE stops giving them that role's recurring tasks.

Manager relationships​

A manager is the person who approves someone's work and hears about it when things stall. In SOPHIE, managers follow roles: you set a manager for each role a person holds, and the candidates are the people holding the role it reports to (plus the Office Manager).

Set someone's manager​

  1. Go to Team › People and click Edit.
  2. Open the person's card ⋯ menu and choose Edit User.
  3. Under Managers, choose a manager for each role, or No manager. If there's exactly one candidate, SOPHIE picks them for you.
  4. Click Save changes.

The Managers section only appears when at least one of the person's roles reports to another role. Managers apply to Standard approvals, time off and escalations.

Automatic manager assignment​

In Settings › Roles & departments › Roles › Reporting Rules, the Manager Auto-Assignment card sets managers for you based on the hierarchy:

  • Automatically assign managers when users are added to roles is on by default. When someone gets a role, SOPHIE gives them the person holding the role it reports to.
  • The table lists each role and who it Reports To. Change a row to override the hierarchy, or reset it to the default.
  • Sync Now applies the rules to everyone right away and reports how many managers were assigned or updated.

Managers you set by hand are never changed by auto-assignment or Sync Now.

Permission tiers​

Each person has one access level, the same at every location. Set it in their panel in Settings › People & access, under Access:

Access levelWhat it's for
Super AdminEverything, including billing and deleting the workspace.
AdminRuns the practice: people, spaces and settings. No billing.
Team MemberDoes the work: writes SOPs, runs tasks, enters numbers.
GuestReads SOPs and completes their own tasks. Changes nothing.

The workspace owner always has full access, and it can't be reduced.

What each tier can do by default​

  • Super Admin: everything. A few things are Super Admin only: billing, deleting the workspace, Full admin access, deleting anyone's comments, and publishing a Standard to the Template Library.
  • Admin: everything else. That includes approving and publishing Standards, inviting and removing people, changing roles and permissions, editing departments and spaces (including adding spaces), the Scoreboard, the patient journey, Edit team schedules, Change booked time off, all meeting permissions, FIX List deadlines and the audit log.
  • Team Member: reads, writes and edits Standards (but doesn't publish, approve, archive or delete them), creates and completes tasks, starts meetings, and views people, locations, departments, reports, the Scoreboard and the patient journey. They can still fill in Scoreboard metrics assigned to their roles. They can edit their own schedule and book their own time off, but not other people's.
  • Guest: views Standards, people, locations, departments, reports and the patient journey, and views and completes their own tasks. No Scoreboard.

Fine-tune one person's permissions​

Under What … can do in a person's panel, each area (SOPs, Tasks, Scoreboard, Patient journey, Reports, People, Spaces, Departments, Workspace) has a level: None, View, Edit or Manage. Each level includes the ones before it. The tier's own level is marked as the default. Open an area to switch single permissions on or off.

Under Special permissions you'll find switches for permissions that don't fit a ladder. The ones that come up most:

  • Edit team schedules: edit other people's schedules and time off, and each location's hours and holidays. Everyone can edit their own schedule without this. See Team Schedule.
  • Change booked time off: edit or cancel time off that's already booked, including your own. Everyone can book time off without this. See Time Off.
  • Delete anyone's comments: everyone can delete their own.
  • Start a meeting, Coach meeting headlines, End someone else's meeting: see Power Meets.
  • Change Fix List deadlines: how fast items must be picked up and fixed, and when a manager is told.
  • See the audit log: who changed what, and when.
  • Full admin access: bypasses every other permission.

A person with changes shows as, for example, "Team Member + 2 custom", and a changed area shows what it was before ("was View"). Use Reset all (or reset one area) to go back to exactly what the tier gets. If you change someone's tier later, their custom changes carry over.

Click Save changes to apply.

Good to know​

  • Who can manage roles and access: creating, editing and deleting roles takes permission to edit the workspace. Changing someone's roles, access or managers takes Change permissions. Both are held by Super Admins and Admins by default.
  • Change permissions is powerful. Someone who holds it can give others, or themselves, more access. Grant it carefully.
  • Owners are roles. When SOPHIE asks who owns a Standard or a Patient Journey step, the answer is always a role, never a single person. People change. The role carries the responsibility to whoever holds it next.