How companies, roles, permissions, departments, and employees fit together to decide who can see and change what.
Real help from real food people
Chef Diego runs a real food plant. If this page didn't get you there, tell us — a person reads every message.
Every person in Bettr Manager sees a different slice of it. A floor lead weighs batches and never touches billing; an outside auditor reads your lot history and changes nothing. That comes from a few pieces working together — the companies someone belongs to, the role they hold, any extra permissions you add on top, and their separate workforce record. Set those once and a new hire lands in exactly the right place. You manage the access side from User companies.
Your account is one organization, and inside it you run one or more companies — each a plant or a legal entity. Access is scoped to a company, so the first thing you decide about a person is which companies they can open.
On User companies you see everyone who can sign in, and for each person three controls: which companies they can reach, their role, and their additional permissions. Manage companies sets the companies a person can work in. Someone who only runs the commissary never sees the other plant's data, and the company switcher in the top corner only offers the companies they belong to.
Access is granted and revoked as an event, not erased. Take a person out of a company and the record of what they did there stays intact, which is what keeps your traceability honest after people come and go.
A permission is the right to do one specific thing — view recipes, approve purchase orders, edit an employee. Bettr Manager has a fixed catalog of them, grouped by area (Production, Warehouse & Inventory, Procurement & Sales, Contacts & Billing, Workforce, and a few more), and most are shaped as Create, Read, Edit, and Delete on one kind of record.
A role is a named bundle of those permissions. You set it up once and hand it to everyone who does that job, instead of ticking boxes person by person. Every organization starts with an Administrator role that holds every permission; you build the rest — a Kitchen Lead, a Quality reviewer — to match your floor from Roles. Each person holds one role, and that role also decides whether they open a production run in the Operator or the Supervisor view.
Sometimes one person needs a little more than their role gives them. From a member's you grant those extra rights on top, without touching anyone else who shares the role. The permissions the role already grants show up checked but locked — you can only add here, never take a role's permission away from a single person.
These are the exception, not the rule. A person's real access is their role's permissions plus anything extra you granted. Assign them a different role and Bettr Manager clears those extras, so start from a role that fits and layer on only what is genuinely one-off.
Departments — Logistics, Production, Quality, and whatever else your operation runs — organize people by the work they do, not by what they can see. They show up on production runs and in daily staffing, and each person can belong to one or more.
Keep the two ideas apart: a role decides what someone can do, a department decides where they fit in the flow. The same person can be a Kitchen Lead by role and sit in the Production department.
Members are the people who log in. Employees are your people directory — the workforce side of the same team, with a hire date, a department, a status (Pending, Active, Inactive, or Terminated), pay, availability windows, and personal or coaching documents.
Most of your team is both: a login that carries their access and an employee record that carries their workforce details. The two stay separate on purpose. An owner can have a login and no employee record, and an employee record can sit as Pending before that person ever signs in.
Bettr Manager does not just hide buttons. A permission someone lacks stays out of reach even if they know the address, because access is enforced in three places:
That is why the role you assign matters more than what the screen happens to show: access is decided by permissions, everywhere.