Roles — the industry's names, the minimum set

What a role actually does in PropFlow today, how the list grew to ten, what AppFolio, Yardi, RealPage, EliseAI and our own customers call these jobs, and the six roles we should start with before Western Slope, Situs Group and ConAm sign in next week.

2026-09-10, rewritten late evening after Fede's rulings · decision 1 decided (the six) (roles are the job a person holds in their company; no accounting role now; minimum set, add later) · all three decisions decided (Sep 10–11) · podcast episode (6 min)

1 · What a role actually controls (it is not just the sidebar)

A role is one word stored on a person's membership in a company. That one word is read in eight different places. Only the first is "just UI".

Two things a role does not control, and should not: what a company has paid for (their modules; ruled Aug 25 and Sep 7: entitlement is the outer gate, a role only narrows inside it) and whose AppFolio login is on file for a building (a technical field that happens to be named "owner" in the code; Gera's design says it must never appear in a roles list).

2 · The current state of the world

Ten names, five behaviours

Three screens, three different lists

Who actually holds a role today

Read from the production user table on Sep 10 (counts only, no names).

How we got here

3 · How the industry names these jobs

Fede's rule: a PropFlow role is the job a person holds in their company, in the words the industry uses. So the question is not what abstraction is cleanest, it is what the people at Western Slope, ConAm and Situs already call each other. Four sources, from most to least binding for us.

AppFolio's own standard roles (all three customers live here)

AppFolio ships 13 standard user roles, customisable per company; Plus-tier customers can also copy a role under a new name. Owners are not users at all: they get a separate Owner Portal with its own per-owner permissions (dashboard, reports, documents), which is the same shape in Buildium, RealPage and Yardi.

The rest of the market, in one table

Yardi Voyager, Entrata and Rent Manager ship configurable security groups rather than fixed names; the job names above are what their customers configure. EliseAI's documented roles: Organization Admin, Community Admin, Owner, Delinquency Agent, Analyst.

What our own customers call their people

4 · The minimum set: six roles

Every word below is either an AppFolio standard role or a title one of our customers uses today. "Property Manager" rather than "Community Manager" because AppFolio, Buildium and two of our three customers say Property Manager; the hint text can say "community manager" for ConAm-style shops. "Leasing Agent" rather than "Leasing Consultant" for the same reason. Which buildings a person covers stays a separate setting on their membership, because Kat covers every Western Slope building and Jaise covers one.

What changes versus today, per role

5 · One place for roles, and nobody gets their own copy

Fede asked how to consolidate roles into one place and make sure nobody adds their own list again. The answer has two halves, and the first is being built tonight as a dark change with no visible difference.

1. Done, Sep 10 night: the catalog, the three screens reading from it, and the guard test are merged (the bot review caught a fourth hand-written list on the Settings re-role picker, now also on the catalog). Every screen now offers the same six roles per decision 1. Nothing a customer hears from Clara changed.
2. Done, Sep 11: Regional Manager removed from every picker; Maintenance relabelled Maintenance Technician. Still to do, no decision needed: delete the dead invite screen; backfill the twelve users with no role and refuse to save a membership without one.

6 · Decisions for Fede

Answers save for everyone who opens this page. Already ruled today and not re-asked: roles are named for the job a person holds in their company; no accounting role now; start minimal and add later.

7 · What this deliberately leaves alone

• How Clara recognises staff on the phone and by email, and which tools each role may trigger: already keyed on the same behaviours, no change.
• Who gets paged for renewals and missed calls: manager roles, as today.
• Company modules (what a customer paid for): still the outer gate; a role only narrows inside it.
• The first-sign-in path for a company admin (terms, second factor, setup wizard): unchanged.

Sources

Live code at the main branch on 2026-09-10: the role list and permission tables (src/lib/platform/auth/permissions.ts, permissions-source.ts), the three pickers, the staff-recognition list Clara uses, the tool authorisation matrix, the invite and accept endpoints. The company-model design record from May 10. The Sep 10 roles inventory and handoff on the onboarding hub; production user counts read on Sep 10 by that inventory. Today's standup, raw per-speaker transcript (Fede, Gera, Sean). AppFolio help center: "User Roles in AppFolio", "Manage User Roles and Permissions", "Adding Maintenance Technician Users", "Owner Portal Permissions" (local knowledge-base copies). Yardi Breeze custom-roles post; Buildium "User Roles and staff member access"; RealPage OneSite and Entrata product docs; EliseAI SSO role-mapping article; NAA credentials pages (CALP, CAM, CAPS, CAMT); IREM ARM/CPM. Design-partner contacts on the onboarding hub. Gera's portfolio architecture design, people section. A direct read of JP&Co's AppFolio role settings was attempted and stopped: the login breaker was tripped from two earlier failures today, so the help-center article stands in for it. This page is a second page next to the hub on purpose: Fede asked for one short, standalone read with diagrams to decide on, and the hub is a running log.