Introduction to roles

Roles allow you to structure your organization by defining a clear hierarchy and reporting relationships among users. They play a key role in controlling record visibility and access, ensuring users can view and manage only the data relevant to their responsibilities. By organizing users into roles, you can maintain proper data security, improve reporting accuracy, and reflect your organization’s structure more effectively. Each user can have only one role at a time.

Accessing roles

To access roles:

• Click Setup from the left sidebar menu, then search and select Roles, or navigate to Users and Teams > Roles.

Parent role

A parent role is the role directly above another role in the hierarchy. It determines reporting relationships and data visibility.

For example, a Sales Manager role can be set as the parent role for multiple sales-related roles such as Sales Executive or Sales Representative. When the appropriate permission set is configured, this hierarchy allows the Sales Manager to view records owned by users in those sub-roles.

Creating a role and assigning users

When your organization grows or responsibilities change, you can create new roles and assign users to them either immediately after creation or later as needed.

To create a new role:

• Navigate to Setup > Users and Teams > Roles.
• Click + Create Role.
• Enter the Role name, optionally select a Parent role, and add a Description.
• Click Create to save the role.

After saving, the role’s detail page opens, allowing you to assign users right away.

• Click the Assign Users button on the detail page.
• In the drawer, select users by checking the boxes next to their names or use the search bar to find them.
• Click Assign to confirm.

To assign users later:

• Go to the roles listing page and click the Assign users icon in the User count column of the role.
• Alternatively, open the role’s details page and click Assign Users.
• Select users and click Assign to confirm.

Role-based access to records

Defining a role as a parent role alone does not grant any permissions to the users of that role. Permissions must be configured separately using permission sets. To understand how permissions work with roles, refer to Managing permissions to view, edit, and delete records.