Roles and permissions
System and custom roles, record and field security — enforced the same way in the UI, queries and API.
klerc resolves permissions on every request from four things: the person's role, their teams, the role hierarchy and any records shared with them. The same rules are enforced in tables, search, reports, Molly's answers and the API, so there's no back door.
System roles#
Every organisation has four system roles. They can't be deleted.
| Role | What it can do |
|---|---|
| Owner | Full access to everything in the workspace |
| Admin | Manage members, schema and all records — but not billing |
| Member | Create records and work with their own |
| Guest | Only sees the Team Inbox conversations they're added to |
Custom roles#
Create roles that match how your business works in Settings → Roles → New role. A role defines what its members can do with each object, each field, each feature and system capabilities. Roles can inherit from a parent, which builds the hierarchy.
The demo brokerage has roles such as Agency Agent, Agency Manager, Claims Executive, Claims Team Lead, Claims Manager and Accounts.
Record security#
- Org-wide defaults set the baseline for each object: private, read-only or read-write.
- Sharing grants access to one record for a user, a team or a role.
- Hierarchy gives managers access to records owned by the roles beneath them.
Under the hood this is relationship-based access control (ReBAC), built on OpenFGA.
Field security#
Field permissions decide, per role, whether a field can be read, written or is hidden entirely. A hidden field — Commission, say — doesn't appear in tables, record pages, exports, search results, reports or API responses for people without access. Attempts to reach it are denied and written to the audit log.
Features and tokens#
- Whole features can be switched off for everyone. See Feature toggles.
- API tokens can never do more than the person who created them. See Authentication.
A worked example#
A claims executive at the demo brokerage:
- has the Claims Saathi Executive role — read and write on claims cases, read-only on policies, no access to commissions;
- belongs to the Claims team, so claims shared with that team are visible;
- sits under a Claims Saathi Team Lead in the hierarchy, who therefore sees the executive's cases;
- opens a policy — the Commission field is hidden for their role, so it simply isn't there.