Accounts & Users

User management in ORCA is simple but powerful.

Admins can invite users, assign roles, and control access to specific sections or records.

Add or Remove Users

Go to Settings → Users, and click “Add User”. Enter their name, their email address, and assign them a role and title (both optional and configurable).

You can remove users at any time, or mark them inactive to retain history.

ORCA will use the users initials as an avatar by default, but you can also upload an avatar or headshot image - you can even take a picture directly from your mobile by scanning the QR Code on the Edit User page with your phone.

Roles & Permissions

Roles can be customised to limit what users can see or do - from read-only observers to full admins.

As ORCA does not believe in a "bums-on-seats" model, you can add as many new users as you like without affecting the subscription costs. Do you have an intern starting for a couple of weeks? No bother - add them in and limit their permissions with a new User Role.

Roles live at Settings → Roles. Create as many as you need and assign one to each user. A role has three parts: permissions, sidebar visibility, and record ownership.

Permissions

Permissions control what a role can do: list, view, create, update, and delete, per area of ORCA. Tick the ones the role needs.

Two things keep the list manageable:

• The list only shows permissions for features your account actually uses. If a plugin isn't enabled, its permissions don't appear, so you'll never wade through options that do nothing.
• The Select all checkbox at the top ticks (or unticks) the lot in one go. Handy when building an admin role, or when starting from everything and trimming back. If some but not all are ticked, the checkbox shows a part-checked state so you can see at a glance that the role is somewhere in between.

Sidebar visibility

By default, a role sees every item in the sidebar navigation. Tick Restrict sidebar navigation for this role to choose exactly which items appear instead.

Once restricted, you get a checklist of everything the sidebar can show, including your custom sections. Anything unticked simply doesn't appear for users with this role. This is about tidiness as much as access: a role for the sales team doesn't need to see modules they'll never open.

Record ownership

Tick Restrict to own records only and users with this role only see records they're assigned to in list views. Assignment means the record has a user-type field containing them. They can still be linked to any record individually; they just won't see everyone else's records in the lists, and can't edit records that aren't theirs.

This suits accounts where each person runs their own patch: agents with their own clients, consultants with their own projects.

The News Editor Role

If your account uses the News plugin with an inbox review workflow, the News Editor role grants permission to manage the inbox: reviewing, publishing, and fetching content for unprocessed articles. Users without this role can still read published news; they just can't process the queue. Assign it to whoever's responsible for curating what goes live.