Part 1 — Understand BigWave · Chapter 4

Who Does What in BigWave

BigWave shows each person a different product depending on two things: their access level, meaning what kind of user they are, and their role, meaning which permissions that kind of user has. Both map onto the people at Beacon Electric below, so later chapters can say “technicians see…” without re-explaining.

Access levels

Every login belongs to one or more access levels:

  • Internal (company). Your office staff. Sees the full application, subject to role permissions.
  • Technician. Field workers. A focused view centered on their own assignments. A person can be both internal and technician.
  • Customer. A login attached to one of your customers. Sees only that customer’s work, in the portal.
  • Site. Like a customer login, scoped to a single site. Useful when a store manager should see their own location and nothing else.
  • Partner. A login attached to a partner company. Sees the projects and assignments you share with them. Partner technicians see their assignments the way your own techs do.
  • Supplier, warehouse and shipper levels exist for companies that use inventory and purchasing.

Separately, a login can be flagged admin, which unlocks administrative buttons like status list editing and defaults, plus the Setup screen.

Roles: permissions within a level

Roles are defined under Setup/Roles. A role is a grid of per-screen permissions: for each screen and panel in the product, can this role read it, create records, update them? Assign each user a role and their navigation omits what they can’t see. Panels they lack read access to never render in the panel list.

Roles can also restrict individual custom fields, so a margin figure or an internal note can live on a work order without every role seeing it.

Create the few roles you actually staff, not the many you can imagine. Beacon runs three: Admin, Office and Field. You can split a role later when a real person needs different access. Speculative roles rot.

The people at Beacon

Marcus (owner, internal + admin). Sees everything: all four home page groups, Setup, Accounting. Lives in All Work Orders, project setup and reports.

Priya (office manager and dispatcher, internal). The same home page minus the admin extras. Her day is the Global group: All Work Orders, the Resource Calendar, Create Work Order.

Grace (accountant, internal). Her role trims the setup screens away and keeps the money: work order Quote / Invoice panels, payment history, the Accounting screen, exports.

Tom (field electrician, technician). Logs in and lands on My Assignments: today’s jobs, each one tap from the work order where he adds comments, photos, time and materials. He also has his own record with his documents, his out-of-office dates, and My Badge, a shareable ID page showing his photo and credentials that he can present on site. Chapter 17 is his day in full.

Harbor Grill’s facilities manager (customer login). Logs into the portal and sees Harbor Grill’s world only: their sites, their work orders and statuses, their documents and approved invoices, and a Create Work Order panel for raising service requests. Project options shape what customers see further, covered in chapters 9 and 14.

Residential (the Okafors): homeowners usually don’t get portal logins at all. They get emailed quotes and invoices, which chapter 13’s automated approval flow handles without a login. Give a residential customer a login when they ask for one.

Setting people up

The mechanics, creating users, technician setup, deactivating people who leave, are in chapter 6. What matters at this stage:

  • Access level decides which product a person gets. Role decides how much of it.
  • Nobody needs to be told what not to touch. If the role is right, the screens they shouldn’t use aren’t there.
  • One person can wear several hats. A working foreman can be internal and technician at once, seeing dispatch screens and his own assignments in one login.

That closes Part 1. You know what the records are, how the screens are laid out, how the grids work and who sees what. Part 2 takes a fresh BigWave and fits it to your operation.