Team and permissions

Spensa has two kinds of people: team members who sign in with an email address, and staff members who sign in with a username. Use this guide to decide which kind of account to create, give each person the right role, and keep staff access limited to the locations where they work.

What this is for

• Invite team members by email.
• Create staff accounts with usernames and passwords.
• Assign company roles and location roles.
• Use custom permissions where your plan allows them.
• Edit names, roles, permissions, and location access.
• Reset a staff member's password.
• Remove people or invitations.
• Create staff groups for announcements and group chats.

Where to open it

On the web, click Users in the left sidebar. This is the one page for your team members, staff accounts, invitations, roles, and permissions. Staff groups have their own page in company settings.

Team management is web only. The phone app is where staff members work, not where you manage them.

Access and permissions

Admins can do everything here, including inviting team members and changing roles. Managers can create and manage staff members, but they cannot invite team members or change team member roles.

These team management rights cannot be handed out through custom roles; they stay with admins and managers.

The two kinds of people in Spensa

Team members sign in with their email address. They work at the company level and can see every location, depending on their role. Use email accounts for owners, office staff, accountants, and managers - anyone who needs invoices, costs, billing, or company-wide oversight.

Staff members sign in with a username. The app calls them "employees". They belong to specific locations and mainly use the phone app for daily work: placing orders, counting inventory, checking their schedule, reading recipes. Use username accounts for cooks, waiters, and warehouse staff. You create these accounts yourself and hand the person their username and password; no email address is needed. The app may also call a location an "establishment"; both words mean the same thing.

Both kinds count together toward your plan's team size (see Good to know).

The Users page

The Users page has two tabs:

• Admin - your team members, plus any open invitations. You can show everything, only members, or only invitations, filter by role, and search by name or email.
• Employee - your staff accounts. You can filter by location and search.

The New User button opens a chooser:

• Admin - "Someone who can manage almost everything in the organization, create suppliers, products, establishments, see invoices and costs."
• Employee - "Only certain privileges like order food for certain establishments. Cooks, Waiters, warehouse workers, etc..."

You can also switch the page into a bulk mode, select up to 50 people or invitations, and delete them in one go. You confirm by typing DELETE.

Invite a team member

Team members join by invitation, so they control their own account and password.

1. On the Users page, click New User and choose Admin.
2. Enter the person's email address.
3. Optionally enter a display name. This is how they appear in this company.
4. Pick a role. The page shows you exactly what that role will be able to do.
5. Send the invitation.

The person receives an email with a link. The invitation is valid for 7 days. They must sign up or sign in with exactly the email address you invited; if they are signed in with a different address, the page tells them the invitation was sent to another one. When they accept, they join with the role and name you set.

Open invitations appear on the Admin tab. You can Resend one, which restarts the 7 days, or Cancel it. You can have up to 50 open invitations at a time. Your plan's team size is checked when you invite and again when the person accepts.

Team roles

Every team member has one role in your company:

• Admin - full access to everything, including billing, company settings, team management, and deleting the company. Every company needs at least one.
• Manager - the day-to-day management role. Managers can run locations, staff accounts, products, suppliers, orders, invoices, and everything operational. They cannot delete the company, change company settings, manage team members, or touch billing.
• User - a working role. Users can view data across the company (invoices, menu costs, analytics, inventory, schedules, staff communications), create orders and send orders from templates, manage tasks, record delivery notes, and record waste and stock outflows.
• Viewer - look only. Viewers can read data everywhere but change nothing.
• Custom - you pick permissions one by one. This is available on the Business plan; on other plans you see an upgrade note.

Custom roles

When you choose Custom, you get a list of permissions grouped by area: organization management, structure, data, orders, inventory, scheduling, tasks, and staff communications. Tick what the person needs. If a permission needs another one to work, Spensa ticks that one automatically and marks it "Granted by another permission", so a custom role always works as expected.

A few permissions are reserved for admins and can never be part of a custom role: deleting the company, changing company settings, managing team members, and managing locations and staff accounts.

For the ready-made roles, the same permission list is shown read-only, so you can always see exactly what a role grants before you assign it.

Edit or remove a team member

1. On the Admin tab, click the person.
2. Change their display name, their role, or, for a custom role, their individual permissions.
3. Save.

A few rules protect you from locking yourself out:

• You cannot change your own role.
• There must always be at least one admin. You cannot remove the last one, and the last admin cannot leave the company.
• You cannot remove yourself here. To leave a company, use the general settings page instead (see Getting started).
• If you take away someone's right to send orders, Spensa also removes them as an order reviewer and as the default reviewer on order templates, and clears their open review requests.

Display names belong to the company, so the same person can appear under different names in different companies.

Create a staff account

Staff accounts are for the people working at your locations. You create the account and give the person their sign-in details.

1. On the Users page, click New User and choose Employee.
2. Enter a display name.
3. Choose a username. It is used for signing in and must be unique among all Spensa users. It can be 3 to 50 characters long and use letters, numbers, underscores, and hyphens.
4. Set a password (at least 8 characters) and confirm it.
5. Assign locations: pick one or more locations and choose a role at each one. One staff member can work at up to 64 locations.
6. Save, then hand the person their username and password.

Staff accounts have no email address in Spensa. That means no verification emails and no email password resets - you reset their password for them.

Location roles for staff

At each assigned location, a staff member has one of these roles:

• Establishment Manager - runs the location's daily operation. Can create, edit, and delete order templates and orders, send orders, handle delivery notes, manage inventory including storages and corrections to finalized counts, record waste, manage schedules, manage tasks, and manage staff communications.
• Employee - the everyday working role. Can view templates, create orders and send them for review, handle delivery notes, count inventory, record waste, see their schedule, manage tasks, and read staff communications.
• Viewer - look only: can see schedules, tasks, and staff communications.
• Custom - pick permissions per location, grouped by order templates, orders, inventory, recipes, scheduling, tasks, and staff communications. Custom roles are available on the Business plan.

Recipe access for staff is only possible through a custom role: you can allow viewing recipes, and separately viewing recipe ingredients. Recipe screens for staff never show prices, costs, or suppliers - staff see how to make the dish, not what it costs.

What staff members see

The phone app is made for staff. Depending on their permissions they see Orders (with a badge when an order waits for their review), Tasks, Team for announcements and chats, Schedule for their own shifts, availability, time off, and open shifts if scheduling is switched on for your company, Inventory, Recipes if you gave them access, and Settings. They do not see the Home page or the assistant.

Staff members can also sign in on the web. They get a reduced view with Orders, Tasks, Team, Conversations, My Schedule, Inventory, and Recipes, plus a location switcher if they work at several locations.

In both places, staff members only ever see their own locations and the data belonging to them.

Reset a staff member's password

If a staff member forgets their password, you set a new one.

1. Open the person on the Employee tab.
2. Set a new password.
3. Tell them the new password.

The moment you save, the staff member is signed out everywhere and needs the new password to get back in. Staff members who still know their current password can also change it themselves in the phone app's Settings.

Edit or delete staff accounts

To edit, open the person on the Employee tab. You can rename them, change their username (Spensa checks it is still free), and change their locations, roles, and custom permissions.

To delete, remove them one by one or select up to 50 in bulk mode. Deleting a staff account is permanent and removes their data.

Pay details

If scheduling is switched on for your company, each staff member can have pay details per location: hourly or monthly pay, with an hourly rate or a gross monthly salary. A quick start fills in typical values for your country without overwriting anything you already set. Only people who manage schedules see these fields.

Staff groups

A staff group is a named group of people at one location, for example "Kitchen" or "Service Friday crew". Groups are used as audiences for announcements, and every group automatically gets its own group chat. Staff groups are only available when staff communications are switched on for your company.

1. Open the staff groups page in your company settings.
2. Click New group.
3. Enter a name (up to 80 characters) and, if you like, a description (up to 500 characters).
4. Pick the location the group belongs to.
5. Choose the members: 1 to 200 people, picked from your team members and staff, with a search to find them quickly.
6. Save.

The group's chat always mirrors the member list: add someone to the group and they join the chat, remove them and they leave it.

The list page lets you search, filter by location, sort by location, group name, or member count, and delete groups in bulk. A group that is used by announcements or chats cannot be deleted; the app tells you so.

Who can manage groups follows staff communications: people who manage staff communications for the whole company manage all groups, while location-level managers only manage the groups of their own locations.

How this connects to other parts of Spensa

• Getting started - how everyone signs in, and the difference between company and location level.
• Settings and billing - your plan decides your team size and whether custom roles are included.
• Orders - order reviewers come from your team; removing someone's sending rights removes them as reviewer.
• Staff communications - staff groups are the audiences for announcements and group chats.
• Scheduling - staff see and manage their own shifts; pay details feed labor costs.
• Recipes - staff recipe access is granted per location through custom roles, always without prices.
• Inventory - counting and waste permissions differ per role.
• Tasks - task permissions differ per role.
• Mobile app - the app your staff members use every day.

Good to know

• Team size limits by plan: Free allows 5 people, Basic allows 10, Business is unlimited. Team members and staff members count together. When the limit is reached, you see an upgrade note.
• Custom roles are a Business plan feature. If your company later moves to a plan without them, everyone with a custom role becomes a Viewer until you assign a new role.
• Invitations expire after 7 days; resending restarts the clock. Up to 50 invitations can be open at once.
• Usernames must be unique across all of Spensa, not just your company.
• One staff member can be assigned to up to 64 locations.
• Bulk actions handle up to 50 people or invitations at a time.
• Staff groups have 1 to 200 members and belong to exactly one location.
• Staff members cannot delete their own account; the phone app tells them to contact their administrator.
• Team members never need location assignments; their company role covers every location.