Understanding roles

Learn what each of the seven roles does in a merit cycle, so you can choose the right one for each person before you invite them. Nothing needs to be set up first; the roles are the same in every workspace.

The seven roles

A role says what job someone does in a cycle, not how senior they are. Each member of your workspace holds one role.

Role	What they do in a cycle
Total Rewards Admin	Owns the merit cycle end to end. Loads the employee data and pay bands, then creates, configures, launches and cancels the cycle. Reads every worksheet, and edits none of them.
People Manager	Plans and submits a recommendation for each person on their own team. A manager of managers also reviews and decides on the worksheets of the managers beneath them.
Final Approver	Approves or returns the final rollup of every worksheet, and holds the authority to approve the final budget. Reads each worksheet waiting on their decision.
Finance Manager	The finance stakeholder accountable for the cycle budget, from sign-off through reconciliation.
Legal / Compliance Manager	The stakeholder accountable for regulatory compliance and pay equity.
HR Business Partner	An HR partner to the business. The role does not administer the workspace.
System Admin	Administers the workspace itself: its members, their roles, ownership, and its security settings. Can also set up and run a cycle.

Who administers the workspace

Two roles administer the workspace: System Admin and Total Rewards Admin. Every role’s sidebar has Home, Worksheets and People; an administrator’s also has Cycles, the Organization group — Pay bands, Performance reviews and Data hub — then Audit log and Settings. Selecting Settings swaps the sidebar for the list of settings, grouped under Workspace and Access, with Back to app at the top. Someone who opens an administrator’s page without one of those roles is told which role it needs, and offered a way back to Home.

Some settings are for a System Admin alone: adding and managing members, the workspace’s name, address and brand colour, single sign-on, SCIM, the workspace’s two-step verification rules, and the assistant switches.

A People Manager keeps everything their own work needs: their worksheets, the rollup for the teams beneath them, and the people directory, as a table or as the org chart. See Reading the org chart.

The account owner

One member is the account owner, marked Owner on the members list. Ownership isn’t an eighth role: the owner is a System Admin, and ownership is what they hold on top of it. Whoever creates the workspace is its first owner, and the owner can hand it on. See Transferring account ownership.

See the roles in the product

Go to Settings → Access → Roles & permissions. Its Roles tab lists each role’s job in a cycle and what it reaches in six areas: workforce and pay-band data, cycle configuration and launch, worksheets, approvals, the audit feed, and security and membership settings. It is the same in every workspace, and it has nothing to change.

Choose which roles can use the assistant

The assistant sits beside every page and explains the numbers a person can already see. You can turn it off for a single role without turning it off for everyone.

1. Go to Settings → Access → Roles & permissions and open the Assistant tab.
2. Turn off the switch beside a role, such as Legal / Compliance Manager.

A switch saves as soon as you change it, and a toast confirms it. A role that’s off doesn’t see the Ask the assistant button or get its keyboard shortcut, and the assistant refuses its questions. The math on each number still opens on hover. There is a switch for every role, System Admin included; a System Admin who turns off their own role keeps Settings and can turn it back on.

Only a System Admin can change these switches. A Total Rewards Admin sees them all, disabled, with Only a System Admin can change these. To turn the assistant off for the whole workspace, use the Assistant card on Settings → Workspace → General; see Customizing workspace settings and branding. While the workspace switch is off, the role switches stay editable and take effect once it’s back on.

Each change is recorded on the audit trail’s Account activity tab, with who made it, when, and which switch changed.

To give someone a role, see Inviting your team and managing access. To choose which roles see each field on an employee record, see Configuring field-level permissions.