Team roles and what each one can do

Every person on your team holds exactly one role: Owner, Admin, Planner, Purchasing, Warehouse, Finance, or Read-only. A role covers areas of the product (inventory, orders, purchasing, warehouse, finance, reports, settings). When none of the seven fits, give the person a profile of your own instead — see Build your own access profile — and use Limit access to narrow them to particular locations, channels, suppliers, brands or categories.

Owner and Admin are the only roles that can manage the team itself — inviting people, changing someone's role, and removing someone. Every other role can do the work its name describes, but none of them can add or remove teammates or change anyone's role, including their own. Specifically:

• Purchasing creates purchase orders and approves them.
• Warehouse drafts purchase orders from the buy plan (it cannot release them), receives shipments, manages locations, and runs stock counts — planning a count, entering it, and posting it. Note that *approving* a count with a variance is not a Warehouse permission; that step belongs to Planner, Owner or Admin, which is a deliberate second pair of eyes on a number that moves stock rather than an oversight. Warehouse also ships orders and cancels units that have not shipped. It cannot open a return or issue a refund.
• Finance manages the money side of returns — refunds and return-to-vendor credits — and marketplace payouts that came in different from expected: marking one disputed, recording what was recovered, or accepting the difference with a written reason (see Dispute a marketplace payout). It also manages, once an Owner or Admin has connected QuickBooks Online, its account mapping. Connecting an accounting system is itself an Owner/Admin action, the same as every other integration.
• Planner manages inventory and the catalog, raises purchase orders, and can decide workflow approvals such as count variances. A Planner cannot approve a purchase order; that belongs to Purchasing, Owner, or Admin.

Reports and every area's own read-only view are visible to every built-in role. A profile of your own can leave an area's view out.

Costs, prices, stock values and margin are a permission of their own, See costs, values and margin. Owner, Admin, Planner, Purchasing and Finance have it; Warehouse and Read-only do not, so for them every money figure is left out of what they see, while the quantities stay. To hide cost prices from a Planner, Purchasing or Finance member, give them a profile that leaves that permission out (Build your own access profile). An Owner or Admin is never on a profile, so always sees them.

Read-only can see the operational product — inventory, orders, purchasing, warehouse, finance, reports — but cannot make any change anywhere in it, except drafting purchase orders from the buy plan. A draft commits nothing: only Purchasing, Planner, Owner or Admin can release it to a supplier. Useful for an accountant, an investor, or anyone who needs visibility without the ability to act. What it cannot see is team management itself — the roster and pending invitations — which is Owner/Admin only, for every role below them and not just for Read-only. Workspace settings such as the purchase-order approval policy and planning defaults are readable by everyone and changeable only by an Owner or Admin.

If someone says they can't do something you'd expect their role to allow, confirm which role they're actually assigned (Settings → Team & roles, visible to Owner/Admin) before troubleshooting further — a surprising number of "this is broken" reports turn out to be the wrong role.