Roles & Access
Everyone who uses BayWise Scheduler holds a role, and the role decides what they can see and do. Roles are assigned when you invite somebody and can be changed at any time.
BayWise ships six roles. Most workshops use three or four of them.
The roles
| Role | Who it is for |
|---|---|
| Account Owner | The person who owns the account. Full access, including billing. |
| Org Admin | Operations manager across the business. Full access except billing. |
| Location Manager | The manager of one site. Full access for their location, including closing the day. |
| Service Advisor | The person facing the customer — check-in, promise times, keeping the customer informed. |
| Workshop Controller | The person running the floor. Everything needed to run the day, without the configuration and commercial controls. |
| Read Only | An observer or auditor. Sees everything, changes nothing. |
The complete permission matrix is in Roles & Capabilities.
Choosing roles
The mistake worth avoiding is making everybody an admin because it is simpler. It is simpler right up to the morning somebody edits the service catalogue to fix one job and changes what every future job of that type is estimated at.
A workable default for a single-site shop:
| Person | Role |
|---|---|
| Owner | Account Owner |
| Workshop manager | Location Manager |
| Controller running the floor | Workshop Controller |
| Service advisors, front desk | Service Advisor |
| Accountant, or the group’s operations analyst | Read Only |
For a group:
| Person | Role |
|---|---|
| Group principal | Account Owner |
| Group operations manager | Org Admin |
| Each site’s manager | Location Manager |
| Each site’s controller | Workshop Controller |
| Each site’s advisors | Service Advisor |
What the roles actually separate
Four boundaries matter more than the others.
Configuration versus operation. Changing bays, technicians, the service catalogue, operating hours or presets changes how every future job is planned. Running the day does not. Workshop Controllers and Service Advisors run the day; managers and admins change the shape of the shop.
The promise versus the resources. A Service Advisor can create a job, edit it, and set the time promised to the customer. A Service Advisor cannot assign a bay or a technician — that stays with the Workshop Controller. The person facing the customer owns the promise; the person facing the floor owns the resources. Splitting these two keeps a mid-call promise from overriding what the floor actually has capacity for.
Closing the day. Day close is restricted, because it is the record of what happened and it releases the next day’s scheduling. Account Owners, Org Admins, Location Managers and Workshop Controllers can close a day; Service Advisors cannot.
Commercial. Rates, incentive schemes, plan and billing sit with owners and admins.
How permissions appear on the board
A control somebody does not have permission to use is not shown to them at all. A Service Advisor does not see a greyed-out bay-assignment control they can never press; they see a card without one.
There is one deliberate exception. When the board is read-only because a day has not been closed, controls the person does hold permission for stay visible but disabled, with a note explaining why. The distinction is intentional: “you cannot do this” and “you cannot do this right now” are different messages, and blurring them teaches people the product is broken rather than that something needs doing.
→ Understand the scheduling freeze
Access across locations
A person is invited to the organisation and given access to one location, several, or all of them.
Somebody with access to several locations sees one location at a time and switches between them. What they see — the board, the bays, the technicians, the analytics — is always the location they are currently in.
Owners and admins with organisation-wide access work the same way: they operate in a location at a time, and switch.
Custom roles
Beyond the six standard roles, an Account Owner, Org Admin, or Location Manager can define roles of their own by choosing exactly which permissions they carry. This is useful where a workshop has a genuinely distinct job — a parts controller, an insurance liaison, a quality inspector — that does not fit an off-the-shelf role.
Start from the standard role closest to the job and adjust, rather than building from nothing.
Removing a permission from a role removes it from everybody holding that role, immediately. Before narrowing a role in a live workshop, check who holds it.
Roles and the record
Actions on the board are recorded against the person who took them. Who started the work, who reported the delay, who paused it and why, who closed the day, who handed the vehicle over.
This is not surveillance and it should not be presented to a team as such. It is what makes the record worth anything: when a customer asks why their car took four days, the answer is a sequence of recorded events rather than four people’s memory of a week ago.