Every team member holds at least one role, and every role controls what that person can see and do across the app through one permissions matrix — a row per category, set on the role's Details tab in **Settings
Roles**.
Primary role
If someone holds more than one role, one is marked as their primary role — it's shown as their job title around the app and is the role used when they're assigned to a deal by default.
Access levels
Each row in the matrix sets an access level for one category of the app:
- None — the category is hidden from that person entirely.
- View — they can see it but not change it.
- Edit — full control: view, create, edit, and delete.
Deals: Edit is required to create a deal. A role with Deals set to View can see deals but won't see the New Deal button on the Whiteboard, and a direct attempt to create one is blocked — give the role Edit on the Deals row if it should be able to add deals.
Deal scope: My deals / Team deals
Six rows — Deals, Whiteboard, Calendar, My Tasks, Comms, and Team Runs — carry a second control: My deals or Team deals. This decides which deals that category shows, independent of its access level:
- Team deals — the default. Every team deal shows up in that category.
- My deals — limits that category to deals the member is assigned to (as owner, transaction coordinator, or a listed deal employee).
The Automators row has the same two-value control, labeled My lanes / All lanes instead — see the next section for what a "lane" is.
Every other row (Inbox, My Dashboard, My Pay & Time, Team Dashboard, Contact Hub, Employee Sentinel, Reports, Net Company Profit, Settings) has no scope control — scope only makes sense where deals (or automator lanes) are involved.
Team Runs also controls the deal Financial tab. None hides a deal's Financial tab entirely; View shows it with every total visible but no add/edit/delete actions; Edit works exactly like it always has. Adding or editing a deal's expenses on the Financial tab needs both Deals: Edit and Team Runs: Edit — if a deal opens read-only for you, its Financial tab is read-only too.
Net Company Profit
The Net Company Profit row controls the two most sensitive numbers on a deal: the Total Commissions figure and the Net Company Profit figure (what's left after commissions come out) — plus the deal's P&L statement and the QuickBooks closed-deals export, both of which include those same numbers. A team admin always sees these figures regardless of what this row says. The built-in roles that can see Reports or Team Runs (Finance, Acquisition Rep, Disposition Agent, Transaction Coordinator, Project Manager and View Only) come with it set to View, and so does any existing role on your team that could see Reports or Team Runs before this row was added. A role you build from scratch starts at None. In the P&L statement, someone who isn't an admin sees only their own commission line — never a teammate's — though the totals still include everyone.
Unlike most rows, View and Edit mean the same thing here — there's nothing to edit, only to see — so Edit is disabled; set it to View to grant someone access. Give a role View on this row if you want that role (for example, a senior partner or bookkeeper who isn't a full admin) to see commission totals and post-commission profit; set it to None to keep those numbers admin-only for that role.
Automators: My lanes / All lanes
The Automators row controls who can build automators (create, edit, publish, install from the TED library, archive/unarchive) and who can start one by hand on a deal:
- None (the default for a new custom role) — can't build or manually start any automator, unless they qualify a different way (see below). The built-in Transaction Coordinator, Disposition Agent, Project Manager, and Acquisition Rep role templates ship with Edit + My lanes instead, so those roles can build and run their own lane out of the box; Finance and View Only stay at None.
- View — no building rights either; manual start still depends on the rules below.
- Edit + My lanes — can build and manually start any automator whose home role (set when it's built) is a role they hold. An automator with no home role set yet has no lane, so anyone with Edit can build or start it.
- Edit + All lanes — can build and manually start any automator on the team, regardless of home role.
My lanes limits what you can build and start, not what you can see. Automators in other lanes aren't hidden from the team: if someone shares a link to one, it opens read-only. In the Automators and Team Runs lists, a My lanes role sees only its own lanes, while team admins and All lanes roles can switch between lanes.
Two other things can let someone manually start a specific automator on a specific deal even without an Automators grant at all:
- They're a team admin.
- They hold that automator's home role for that deal — for example, if an automator's home role is Transaction Coordinator, that deal's own TC can start it.
See Running an automator on a deal for how this plays out from the deal side.
Someone whose Deals row is set to My deals sees a My deals / Company board toggle at the top of the Whiteboard: My deals (the default) shows only their assigned deals; Company board shows every team deal, but cards for deals that aren't theirs are locked — no opening, editing, or dragging, just a label showing who it's assigned to. Opening a deal you're not assigned to is also blocked at the URL level — going to its link directly (including one someone sent you) shows a "You don't have access to this deal" page.
If a member holds more than one role, the most open level and scope win for every row: any role granting Edit beats a lower level any other role grants for that same category, and any role scoped to Team deals beats another role's My deals for that same category.
What "admin" means
You're an admin if you hold a role with Edit access on the Settings row — like the built-in Admin role. Admins can manage roles, team members, and every other team setting, and always see and act on every deal regardless of any category's scope setting. Settings has no view-only mode — a role either grants admin access (Edit) or it doesn't (None or View, both non-admin) — so View is disabled on the Settings row.
Making a role admin locks the rest of its matrix: every other row shows Edit and Team deals, disabled, with a note explaining why. This isn't a new restriction — admins already have full access to everything regardless of what any other row says; the lock just shows that plainly instead of letting you set values that would never take effect. To take a role out of admin, change the Settings row itself — the rest of the matrix unlocks immediately once Settings is no longer Edit.
Creating and editing roles
Settings > Roles (admin only) lists your team's roles. Select Create Role to add one, or select a role to edit it: set its Role Name, Description, Department, Linked deal seat, and the permissions matrix. Editing a role also has a Commission Rules tab.
Your team always needs at least one admin. If an edit would remove the only role granting admin access, it's blocked with an explanation — give another role Edit access to Settings first, or assign an existing admin role to someone else, before removing it from this one.
Linked deal seat
Every role can optionally be linked to one of the fixed deal seats — Acquisitions, Transaction Coordinator, Dispo Agent, or Originated by — using the Linked deal seat field on the role's Details tab (default None). Linking a role tells TED that role corresponds to that seat — for example, if your team has both "TC" and "Closing Coordinator" roles that both do transaction-coordination work, you can link both to the Transaction Coordinator seat. More than one role can link to the same seat. Linking (or re-linking) a role also restarts automator runs that were stuck waiting for someone — a run waiting for an owner in that role, on deals where the seat is filled, and a step waiting on that seat when someone on the deal's Employee tab holds the newly linked role.
Linking a role to Originated by works differently: it's for paying a commission, not for staffing. That role's commission rules pay whoever is in a deal's Originated by seat, without adding them to Assigned Employees — so it doesn't give them access to the deal. Use it for people you pay a cut to but who shouldn't open the deal. Save the change and TED applies the role's rules to your open deals right away. With one role linked to Originated by, whoever is in the seat is paid by it, whatever role they hold. If more than one role is linked, a person is paid by the one they hold — only one, the oldest, if they hold several; someone who holds none of them isn't paid by any.
The person in the seat still sees their own commission line. With a percentage rule, that's their percentage and the dollar amount, which reveals the deal's size. If that matters, give the role linked to Originated by a flat-amount rule instead.
New teams start with Transaction Coordinator linked to the TC seat, Acquisition Rep linked to the Deal Owner seat, Disposition Agent linked to the Dispo seat, and Project Manager linked to the PM seat by default; every other built-in and custom role starts unlinked. The PM seat only exists on deal types that use a Project Manager — Fix & Flip and Retail Resale — so the Project Manager role only matters on those deals.
Common issues
- "Access Denied" — you don't have permission to access that category. Contact your team admin if you think this is a mistake.
- "You don't have access to this deal" — your role's Deals row is set to My deals and this deal isn't assigned to you (you're not the owner, the transaction coordinator, or listed as a deal employee on it). Ask a team admin if you think you should have access.
- "Couldn't verify your access" — a temporary connection problem stopped us from checking which deals you're assigned to. Select Try again; if it keeps happening, check your internet connection.
See Inviting a team member and Managing team member roles for where roles get assigned to people, Organizing departments for how departments group roles, and Scoping a role to assigned deals and hiding dashboards for the exact steps to set up My deals scope or hide Team Dashboard from a role.