Who does what — seats, roles and permissions
The two things that control access, the seven roles you start with, and how to map your real shop onto them.
Getting a second person onto Brytebuild is where most rollouts stall — usually because one person set it up and nobody else has the access to help. Two settings control what someone sees, and they are easier to reason about once you know they are separate.
Part 01
Two dials, not one
1 minute
Every person has a seat type and belongs to one or more groups. The seat sets the ceiling — the most they could ever see. The groups set the areas they work in. What they can actually do is the overlap, and it is never more than either one allows on its own.
Seats are what you pay for; groups are how you organise work. Keeping them apart means you can move someone between departments without changing what you are billed, and add a shop-floor user without worrying about which group you drop them into.
Part 02
Full seats and shop-floor seats
2 minutes
| Seat | Who it is for | What it allows |
|---|---|---|
| Full seat | Office, planning, purchasing, quality, management. | Everything their groups grant. The groups are the only limit. |
| Shop-floor seat | People at the bench or on the warehouse floor. | A fixed working surface: see their jobs, follow work instructions, record what they did. Cheaper, and enough for the work. |
Putting someone on a shop-floor seat into the Management group does not give them management access. The seat cap is applied on top of the groups, so the result is still the shop-floor surface. That is deliberate — it means a mistake in group membership cannot quietly hand out access you are not paying for.
Progressing an operation, clocking in and out, and recording what was made are part of doing the job, not gated capabilities. A shop-floor user can always do those for work assigned to them.
Part 03
The seven roles you start with
2 minutes
Registering a company seeds seven groups, one per department. They are a starting point, not a fixture — rename them, delete the ones you do not need, or change what they grant. Nothing re-imposes the template later.
| Group | Owns |
|---|---|
| Sales | Customers, quotes, sales orders, invoices. |
| Purchasing | Suppliers and purchase orders — converting the Buy side of an MRP run. |
| Production scheduling | Works orders, the schedule and capacity. |
| Warehouse | Stock, locations, picking, packing, despatch and stock takes. |
| Engineering | Products, bills of materials and work instructions. |
| Quality | Inspections, NCRs, CAPA, calibration and quarantine. |
| Management | Staff, notifications and reporting across the business. |
Permissions are capped by your subscription as well as by the seat. Warehouse permissions, for instance, only take effect if your plan includes the WMS add-on. A group holding a permission your plan does not cover is simply inert — nothing breaks, it just does not apply.
Part 04
The owner, and what only they hold
1 minute
The person who registers the company is the owner and holds everything by default. A few areas start owner-only because they change how the business itself runs rather than how work gets done: company settings, role administration, and document numbering. Any of them can be granted to a group when you are ready to delegate.
It is the quickest way to start and the most common thing to regret. Everything is attributed to one person, so audit trails stop being useful, and nothing can happen while that person is away. Give people their own seat early — it is the difference between a system the business runs on and one person's tool.
Part 05
Mapping your shop onto this
2 minutes
A worked example for a small shop. Adjust the names; the shape holds.
| Person | Seat | Groups |
|---|---|---|
| Owner / director | Full | Owner — everything |
| Office manager | Full | Sales + Purchasing |
| Production lead | Full | Production scheduling + Engineering |
| Stores / warehouse | Full | Warehouse |
| Machinists, assemblers | Shop-floor | Production scheduling |
| Inspector | Full | Quality |
Give people the group that matches their job and nothing else. Widening access when someone asks takes a minute; discovering six months later that everyone could edit prices takes far longer to unpick.