Roles and permissions
Who can see family contact details, billing, and incident records — and how to think about which role to give someone.
Two different things, easy to confuse
RoundUp keeps a person's job title separate from their access level.
- Job title is descriptive — Lead Teacher, Assistant, Cook. It shows on the staff list and in reports. It grants nothing.
- Access level is what RoundUp actually enforces. It decides which screens open and which records load.
Promoting someone's title does not widen their access, and it isn't meant to. If you want someone to see more, change their access level deliberately.
The access levels
| Level | Typically | Can reach |
|---|---|---|
| Staff | Teachers and assistants | Their assigned rooms: rosters, check-in and check-out, daily reports, photos, classroom messages, incident and medication forms. |
| Assistant Director | Leads and closers | Everything Staff can, across all rooms, plus attendance and ratio views for the whole center. |
| Director | The person running the center | All of the above, plus enrollment, staff records, family contacts, billing and reporting. |
| Admin | Owners and multi-site operators | All of the above, plus center configuration and integrations. |
Choosing a role
Give the narrowest level that lets someone do their job. This isn't about trust — it's that the records here are children's records, and the smaller the number of people who can pull a family's full contact history, the easier that is to defend.
A useful test: would this person's job be blocked tomorrow without it? If not, they don't need it yet. Widening access takes seconds when it turns out they do.
The sensitive areas
- Family contacts — phone numbers, addresses and emergency contacts. Director and above.
- Billing — what a family owes and has paid. Director and above.
- Incident and medication records — teachers file them for their own rooms; reading across the center is Assistant Director and above.
- Center configuration and integrations — Admin only. This includes connecting a directory for single sign-on.
If your center signs staff in through JumpCloud, Okta, Microsoft or Rippling, the directory decides who is a staff member. It never decides what they can see. Provisioned staff arrive at the lowest level and are promoted in RoundUp by someone who already holds that access.
Changing someone's access
Open the staff member's record and change their access level. It takes effect on their next screen load — they don't need to sign out and back in.
Reducing someone's access closes those screens immediately. If they had a report open, it stops loading.
More: All director guides