Roles & Permissions
Backscene has three roles: Admin, Editor, and Viewer. Roles exist at two levels — your organization-wide role, and (optionally) a different role on a specific project.
The three roles
Admin has full access. Org admins can manage organization settings, invite and remove members, and have full access to every project in the org regardless of whether they're individually added to it.
Editor can create and edit projects, purchases, and items on projects they're a member of. This is the standard role for most day-to-day team members — producers, coordinators, anyone actively logging spend.
Viewer is read-only by design. Viewers can see projects, purchases, items, locations, and scenes they have access to, but cannot create or edit anything. This is the right role for stakeholders, clients, or anyone who needs visibility without needing to touch the data.
Org role vs. project role
Your organization-level role is your baseline. But you can also be assigned a different role on a specific project — for example, someone who's a Editor user across the org could be made an Admin on one particular project they're leading, giving them elevated permissions just for that project (inviting collaborators to it, managing its budget, approving purchases) without changing their access anywhere else.
Your effective role on any given project is whichever is higher: your org role, or your project-specific role. You never lose access by being added to a project with a lower role than your org role already grants you.
What each role can actually do
| Action | Admin | Editor | Viewer |
|---|---|---|---|
| View projects, purchases, items, locations, scenes | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Create and edit purchases | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Create and edit items | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Create and edit locations | ✓ | — | — |
| Create and edit scenes | ✓ | — | — |
| Manage organization settings and members | ✓ | — | — |
| Access Organization Hub (campaigns, libraries, bulk reconciliation, audit ledger, org settings) | ✓ | — | — |
| Invite or manage collaborators on a project (if elevated to project admin) | ✓ | — | — |
| Edit project budget | ✓ | — | — |
A few specific notes:
- Organization Hub (campaigns, location and vendor libraries, bulk reconciliation, audit ledger, and org settings) requires org Admin access. See Organization Hub and Org Settings.
- Reconciling a purchase (marking it checked off against actuals) is open to anyone who isn't a Viewer on that project — both Admins and Editor users can do it, even on a purchase they didn't personally create. Studio org admins can also use Bulk Reconciliation across projects.
- Viewers never have write access of any kind, even to their own past activity. This is intentional — Viewer is meant to be a strict, predictable read-only boundary.
If your access looks wrong
If you believe you should have more (or less) access than you're seeing, the most common cause is a mismatch between your org role and your project role — check both. If something still looks off after that, use the Support link in the footer to flag it.