User roles and permissions
What are user roles and permissions?
User roles and permissions are the rules that decide who can see and change what in an admin panel. A role is a named bundle of permissions — “order handling”, say, or “warehouse” — and each person gets the role that fits their job instead of a shared login with full access. A mistake or a leaked password then touches a small part of the system, not all of it.
Example
In an online shop run by five people, everyone opens the admin panel for a different job. Instead of one shared password for the “admin” account, the permissions look like this:
| Role | Orders | Products and prices | Customer data | Users and settings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Owner | everything | everything | view and export | everything |
| Order handling (two people) | view and process | view | view | — |
| Warehouse | packing and dispatch | stock levels | delivery address | — |
| Marketing (freelancer) | — | descriptions and photos | — | — |
When the freelancer’s contract ends, their account is switched off in one step, and nobody else has to change a password. If someone deletes a category by mistake, the change history shows who did it and when.
Why it matters for a business
A shared login with full access is convenient until the first problem. The password stays with people who left long ago, sits in a chat thread, and in the logs everyone looks like the same person. Roles limit the damage from a mistake, a stolen password or a departing employee.
They are also part of protecting personal data: GDPR requires appropriate technical and organisational security measures, and access limited to the people who need it is one of the basic ones. Almost every CMS and CRM has roles, but the defaults often grant more than a job needs.
What to ask
- Which roles come by default, and can we create our own with exactly the permissions we choose?
- Are permissions split by action — view, edit, delete, export?
- Is there a history of who changed what, and how far back does it go?
- How is access removed when someone leaves, and do their changes stay in the history?
- Is two-factor authentication required for roles with wide permissions?
On the T&B platform, roles and permissions are set in a matrix inside the admin panel: every person works under their own account and sees only the work they have been given. The admin sign-in also takes two factors, as it does on this site.