Understanding Roles: Owner, Director, Manager, and Staff

Roles: Owner, Director, Manager, Staff — everyone should know how their own role works, and what to expect from a coworker in a different one.

Childcare Owl has four roles per center, and each one gates specific actions rather than acting as a rough label.

Owner has full control. It's the only role that can manage center settings and billing, and the only one that can grant the Owner role to someone else. Every center has at least one, and the system won't allow disabling the last remaining owner.

Director covers most of what an Owner does day to day: inviting and managing staff up to Director level, creating and editing task list definitions, managing rooms, viewing full activity history. A Director can't assign the Owner role, and can't touch billing or center settings.

Manager provides oversight without edit rights on the underlying structure. A Manager can sign off on any list instance in the center, not only ones they're personally assigned to, and can manage certifications, Rounds, and reports. Creating or editing task list definitions, managing staff, and managing rooms are outside a Manager's reach.

Staff is the narrowest role by design: view assigned lists and tasks, mark tasks complete, view your own completion history. A Staff member can't sign off on tasks, can't see center-wide activity history, and doesn't have access to Reports.

One way to keep the split straight: Owner and Director manage structure — who's on staff, what the checklists are, how rooms are configured. Manager and above can approve work. Staff does the work. Every permission in the system follows from that.