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Roles and the shape of your sidebar

Sign two colleagues into the same workspace and they may see what look like two different products: one gets a fifty-link sidebar with Treasury and Payroll, the other gets three links. Neither is broken. The sidebar is a projection of what each seat is allowed to do, computed fresh on every page load.

How the projection works

Section titled “How the projection works”

Three ingredients, multiplied together:

  1. Your capabilities. Your seat’s roles each grant a set of permissions (capabilities), and your seat holds the union of them.
  2. The page registry. Every page in the app declares exactly one view capability that gates it. A page not in the registry doesn’t exist; a page whose capability you lack isn’t shown - and isn’t reachable by URL either. The sidebar and the route guard read the same registry, so what you see and what you can open never disagree.
  3. Presentation. The visible pages are laid into named groups - Reservations, Operations, Revenue, Books, and so on - in a fixed order. Empty groups are dropped: a role that can’t see any finance page gets no finance heading at all, which is why a Cleaner’s app has no trace of a Books section rather than a grayed one.

The result: a Booking Manager sees the funnel and the queue surfaces; an External Accountant sees the books and statements and nothing operational; an Investor sees exactly one page - their portal.

Section titled “What a missing link means”

If a screen you expect isn’t in your sidebar, your seat doesn’t hold its capability - that’s the whole diagnosis. Nothing is loading late, and typing the URL won’t help (same registry, same answer). The fix is a role change on Team, decided by whoever holds that power in your workspace.

Three refinements worth knowing:

  • Locked, not hidden. A page your role may use but your workspace’s plan doesn’t include stays in the sidebar, marked locked, and clicks through to Billing. Role says you can; plan says not yet - those are different answers, shown differently.
  • The bell is chrome, not a page. Notifications reach every seat and live behind the bell icon, not a sidebar row.
  • Where the sidebar looks empty. A seat entitled to nothing navigable - possible for misconfigured external seats - lands on a page that says so plainly and offers the two useful moves: switch workspace or sign out.

Floors: what everyone gets

Section titled “Floors: what everyone gets”

Two baselines sit under the role library. Every seat, without exception, can see its own notifications. Every member-flavored seat also gets a small read floor - the booking list, the daily ops report, guest history - which is why most operational roles share the same first few sidebar rows. Portal-only seats (Cleaner, Inspector, Maintenance, Investor, the property Owner) are deliberately below that floor: their job needs one surface, so their seat gets one surface.