Roles and permissions

Bethel ChMS uses five roles to control what people can see and do. Each role operates at one of two scopes: organisation-level across all branches, or branch-level within a single branch.

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The five roles

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Organisation owner

There is one organisation owner per organisation. The owner has full control over the organisation, including settings, branches, users, billing, currency, ownership transfer, and organisation deletion. The organisation owner is the only person who can transfer ownership to someone else.

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Organisation admin

Organisation admins have visibility across the entire organisation. They can view branch records across all branches and manage supported branch records after selecting a branch. They can manage users, branches, custom fields, tags, update campaigns, and organisation-wide reports. Think of this role as headquarters oversight and administration. Most day-to-day branch data entry still happens at the branch level.

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Branch admin

Branch admins have full control within their own branch. They can create, edit, and delete members, events, locations, attendance records, visitors, and branch update campaigns. They can also invite other branch admins and editors to their branch. This is the right role for a local church administrator or branch pastor who manages their own congregation’s data.

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Editor

Editors can create and edit records within their branch, including members, events, locations, attendance, and visitors. They can view update campaign dashboards and review submitted campaign changes. They cannot delete records, manage campaigns, or manage users. Assign this role to volunteers or staff who need to enter data but should not remove anything or invite other users.

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Treasurer

Treasurers are branch-scoped finance users. They can access Gifting & Donations and gifting reports for their assigned branch. They cannot access members, update campaigns, events, ministries, attendance, users, branch settings, or organisation settings. Assign this role to finance team members who need donation records without wider church management access.

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Org-scoped vs branch-scoped

Roles fall into two groups based on what they can see:

• Org-scoped roles (Org Owner and Org Admin) can see data across all branches. Branch-level pages let them select a branch and manage supported records in that branch.
• Branch-scoped roles (Branch Admin, Editor, and Treasurer) only see their own branch. They work with the data they’re responsible for and have no visibility into other branches.

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Branch selector behavior

Org-scoped users see a branch selector on branch-level pages such as Dashboard, Members, Events, Locations, Attendance, and Visitors. Selecting a branch adds a branchId value to the URL and saves the selection for future pages. Branch-scoped users do not see the branch selector. Bethel ChMS always uses their assigned branch.

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Per-role capabilities

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Who can invite whom

Not every role can invite every other role. Here’s how the invitation chain works:

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How role changes take effect

When you change someone’s role or branch assignment, Bethel ChMS refreshes their access token automatically. The new permissions apply almost immediately, so the person does not need to log out and back in.

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Transferring ownership

Only the current organisation owner can transfer ownership. You might do this when a senior pastor hands off leadership, or when a denominational office restructures how accounts are managed.