Roles and access
Roles control what a member can see and do in Smengo. Each person holds one role in the organization; a role carries a set of permissions rather than a fixed level.
System roles
Smengo ships with five built-in roles that cannot be changed or deleted.
Owner - the organization's creator. Has every permission, including billing and organization settings.
Administrator - full operational access: schedule, employees, departments, statuses, alerts, and invitations. Cannot manage the billing plan.
Manager - sees and edits the schedule for the whole company by default. If you want to limit a manager to specific departments, just assign those departments - they will then see only those. Can see employee contacts. Cannot change the organization's structure.
Viewer - read-only: sees the schedule and employee list, but cannot see contact details and cannot edit anything.
HR - people-focused: manages employees and their documents, sees the HR dashboard and contacts, creates HR tasks.
Role scope
Every role has a scope: Entire organization or By departments.
A "By departments" role sees the whole company by default - until you assign specific departments to it. Assign departments when you want to narrow down the member's view; they will then only see those departments in the schedule. Organization-level permissions (billing, org settings, role management) are unavailable for department-scoped roles.
When you pick a role, a panel appears on the right showing in plain language what that role can see, what it can do, and what it can't. No need to read through the full permission list.
Permission catalog
Permissions are grouped into sections: Schedule, Employees, Documents, Dashboard, History, Structure, Members, Organization. You can see the full list under Settings → Roles and access - click any system role to inspect its permission set.