Roles & Permissions

Roles are the backbone of how SOPHIE organizes your practice. They determine who sees which SOPs, who approves what, and how your team hierarchy flows from the Practice Owner down to every team member.

How Roles Work

Roles in SOPHIE form a hierarchy -- a tree structure where every role (except the top-level Practice Owner) has a parent role above it. Think of it like your practice's actual reporting structure:

• Practice Owner sits at the top.
• Office Manager reports directly to the Practice Owner.
• Department Leads report to the Office Manager.
• Individual roles (Dental Hygienist, Front Desk Coordinator, etc.) sit under their department lead.

Each role belongs to a department, which connects it to a functional area of your practice. This hierarchy matters because it controls:

• SOP assignments -- SOPs assigned to a role automatically appear in that person's task list.
• My Day tasks -- team members see daily tasks based on their role's SOPs and schedules.
• Approval routing -- when someone submits an SOP for review, it routes up the hierarchy to the appropriate approver.
• Manager relationships -- SOPHIE can auto-assign managers based on the role hierarchy.

Core Roles

Every SOPHIE workspace starts with three built-in roles that cannot be deleted:

Practice Owner

The top-level role in your workspace. The Practice Owner has full access to all features, settings, and billing. There is one Practice Owner per workspace.

Office Manager

The Office Manager always reports directly to the Practice Owner and appears immediately below them in the hierarchy. This role typically has access to team management, SOP creation, and approval authority across all departments.

Department Leads

Each department has a lead role (e.g., Clinical Lead, Front Office Lead). Department leads have approval authority for SOPs within their department and manage the team members assigned to roles in their area.

These core roles ensure your practice always has a clear chain of command. You can rename their display names, but the underlying structure remains.

Creating Custom Roles

To add a new role for your practice:

1. Go to Settings > Roles.
2. Click Add Role.
3. Fill in the role details:
   • Name -- the display name (e.g., "Dental Hygienist", "Treatment Coordinator").
   • Department -- which department this role belongs to.
   • Parent Role -- the role directly above in the hierarchy (e.g., a Dental Hygienist might sit under the Clinical Lead).
   • Hierarchy Depth -- set automatically based on the parent role, but can be adjusted.
4. Configure optional settings:
   • Can Approve -- check this if people in this role should be able to approve SOPs.
   • Approval Priority -- the order in which approvers are contacted when multiple are available.
   • Is Management Role -- mark this if the role is part of the management chain.
5. Click Save.

The new role is immediately available to assign to team members.

Naming conventions

Use clear, practice-specific names. "Dental Assistant - Surgical" is more helpful than "DA-S" when your team is looking at the org chart.

Permission Tiers

SOPHIE offers three permission tiers tied to your subscription plan. Each tier determines which features your team can access:

Tier	What It Unlocks
Free	View published SOPs, acknowledge SOPs, basic read access
Professional	Create and edit SOPs, submit for approval, team management, comments, workflow features
Enterprise	AI-powered SOP generation, gap analysis, action items, Practice OS, advanced analytics, admin tools

Permission tiers are assigned at the user level, not the role level. This means two people with the same role can have different feature access depending on their subscription tier. Manage tier assignments from Settings > People.

Role Assignments

Assigning Roles to Team Members

From Settings > People or from a team member's profile on the Team page:

1. Select the team member.
2. Click Assign Role.
3. Choose the role and department.
4. Save the assignment.

A single person can hold multiple roles. For example, in a small practice, someone might be both the Office Manager and the Marketing Lead. Each role assignment connects them to the SOPs, tasks, and approval chains for that role.

Removing Role Assignments

To remove a role from someone, open their profile, find the role assignment, and click Remove. If they have other roles, those remain active. If you remove their only role, they will not see any role-specific SOPs in their task list.

Manager Relationships

Every team member (except the Practice Owner) has a manager -- the person they report to. Managers are important because they:

• Receive SOP submissions for review and approval.
• See their direct reports' progress and acknowledgement status.
• Can delegate their responsibilities when out of office.

How Managers Are Assigned

SOPHIE can auto-assign managers based on the role hierarchy. When you assign someone a role, SOPHIE looks at the parent role in the hierarchy and suggests the person holding that parent role as the manager.

For example, if you assign someone the "Dental Hygienist" role and that role's parent is "Clinical Lead", SOPHIE will suggest the person who holds the Clinical Lead role as their manager.

You can always override the auto-assignment and pick a different manager manually. This is useful when the reporting structure does not exactly match the role hierarchy -- for instance, when a senior hygienist manages other hygienists even though they share the same role level.

Changing Managers

To update a manager assignment:

1. Open the team member's profile.
2. Find the Manager field.
3. Select the new manager from the dropdown.
4. Save.

The change takes effect immediately. Any pending SOP approvals will continue with the original approver, but new submissions will route to the updated manager.

Delegation

Users with management roles can temporarily delegate their responsibilities to another team member. This is useful when a manager is on vacation or otherwise unavailable. See Out of Office for details on setting up delegation.

Viewing Your Own Roles

Any team member can see their own role assignments and what they have access to from Settings > My Roles. This is a read-only view that shows their current roles, department, manager, and permission tier.

You can also see your current roles at a glance from the profile dropdown in the top-right corner of SOPHIE. Click your avatar to open the menu — your workspace roles are displayed below your name. This is a quick way to confirm which roles you hold without navigating to Settings.