Every person in a Folkbase workspace holds one of four workspace roles: admin, manager, staff, or contractor. The role decides what that person can see and change inside Folkbase. It is separate from the role templates that decide which tools a job gets, and this page covers both.
The four roles
| Role | What they see | What they can do |
|---|---|---|
| Admin | The whole workspace: records, grants, tasks, and settings | Manage members, access, integrations, and settings |
| Manager | Their team's records, onboarding, offboarding, access, and analytics | Approve access requests and follow their team's lifecycle work |
| Staff | Their own tasks and their own access | Complete assigned tasks and request access |
| Contractor | A narrower, scoped view of their own work | Use grants that each carry an end date |
Admin
Admins run the workspace. They invite members, install integrations, maintain role templates, and change settings such as the custom domain for the careers page. Keep this role small. Two or three admins is enough for someone to be available without turning admin into the default.
Manager
Managers see their own team. That covers team onboarding and offboarding, the grants each report holds, and team analytics: task completion, review turnaround, and onboarding progress. When someone on the team asks for a tool, the manager can approve the request without routing it through an admin.
Staff
Staff see their own tasks and their own access. Most employees hold this role. If they need something their job does not include, they request it in Folkbase instead of sending a message to IT.
Contractor
Contractors get the same kind of record as employees, with a narrower, scoped view. Every grant they hold carries an end date. When Elio Park joins the Northwind rebrand engagement, his access is set to close when the engagement does, and an extension needs an approval and a new date. See contractor access for the full flow.
Roles and role templates
Both use the word role, so they are easy to mix up. They answer different questions.
- A workspace role controls Folkbase itself: which records, tasks, and settings a person can see or change.
- A role template describes a job: the grants someone in that position should have, such as Slack, Google Workspace, and GitHub for an engineer.
A workspace role decides what someone can do in Folkbase, and a role template decides what they can open everywhere else.
The two combine freely. A design lead and a junior designer can share the Product Designer template while holding different workspace roles: the lead is a manager, the designer is staff. Both get the same tools on day one. Only the lead sees the team.
When onboarding starts, the template's grants are queued as pending. Activating the person opens them. Each grant records the template that justifies it, so the reason for any access stays visible on the record. Grants covers the states a grant moves through.
How access requests move
Templates cover the common case. Requests cover the rest.
- A person asks for a tool their template does not include.
- A manager or admin reviews the request and approves it if the access makes sense.
- The approved request becomes a grant on the person's record, with the request saved as its justification.
- The grant stays until it is revoked, removed in an access review, or closed on exit.
Because the request travels with the grant, nobody has to reconstruct later why a person had a tool outside their template.
Plans and advanced roles
Starter includes the admin, manager, and staff roles, along with access grants by role. Business adds advanced roles, alongside multiple workspaces and the audit log. If your organization needs distinctions the four roles do not draw, Business is the plan to look at. Pricing lists what each plan includes.