Each role is designed to match a specific responsibility within the estate management ecosystem—from on-site tracking to financial governance.
To keep property operations secure and compliant, Basementgrid structures workspace access into six distinct user roles. Each role is designed to match a specific responsibility within the estate management ecosystem—from on-site tracking to financial governance.
The User Roles
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Administrator
- Who it's for: Property Managers, Managing Agents, or Head Estate Administrators.
- What they can do: Full operational control over the workspace. Admins can manage users, map locations, add assets, configure vendors, create and issue work orders, and access overall performance reports.
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Approver (New in v2.0)
- Who it's for: Management Committee Members, Council Members, or Financial Overseers.
- What they can do: Financial governance and oversight. Approvers have read-only visibility into overall estate operations, but they hold explicit power to approve or reject vendor quotes and work order expenses that cross "Above Threshold" spending limits before work can be authorized.
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Collaborator
- Who it's for: The estate's own internal, in-house maintenance staff—not external vendor companies.
- What they can do: Field execution. Collaborators can view issued work orders, log status updates (like clocking in "Enroute"), upload GPS-verified photos, leave operational comments, and track the historical lifecycle of tasks they are assigned to.
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Requester
- Who it's for: Residents, Tenants, or Sub-occupants.
- What they can do: Lodging issues. Requesters can quickly submit maintenance requests, add photos of faults, and track the progress of their own submissions. They have zero visibility into other tenants' issues or general estate assets.
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Vendor Manager
- Who it's for: Vendor company owners, account managers, or team leads responsible for a vendor's relationship with the estate.
- What they can do: Vendor-side administration. Vendor Managers receive and respond to work orders and quote requests on behalf of their company, and are responsible for building out their own field team by inviting and managing Vendor Technicians. They can view all jobs assigned to their company and the technicians working on them.
- Note: When an Admin adds or invites a vendor company to the workspace, that invite is effectively an invite to the vendor's Vendor Manager—there's no separate "vendor" account distinct from the Vendor Manager who represents that company.
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Vendor Technician
- Who it's for: Field staff employed or subcontracted by an external vendor company—not the estate's own staff.
- What they can do: Field execution, scoped to their vendor's jobs. Vendor Technicians can view work orders assigned to them, log status updates, upload GPS-verified photos, and leave operational comments.
Collaborator vs. Vendor Technician: Both roles perform the same kind of on-the-ground work—clocking status updates, uploading photos, logging comments—but they exist on opposite sides of the workspace. A Collaborator is part of the estate's own in-house team, invited and managed directly by the Admin. A Vendor Technician belongs to an external vendor company, invited and managed by that company's own Vendor Manager. This keeps each vendor's roster private to them and out of the estate's direct user list, while still giving the Admin full visibility into the work being done.
Workspace Invitation Rules
Your role dictates who you are allowed to invite into the workspace to expand the team:
- Administrators: Can invite users to any estate-side role, plus Vendor Managers (Admins, Approvers, Collaborators, Requesters, or Vendor Managers). When an Admin invites or onboards a vendor company, that invite goes to the vendor's Vendor Manager—Admins do not invite Vendor Technicians directly; that's handled by the vendor's own Vendor Manager.
- Approvers: Do not handle user administration and cannot issue workspace invites.
- Collaborators: Can invite other Collaborators (such as onboarding additional field technicians) or Requesters.
- Requesters: Can only invite other Requesters (e.g., a primary tenant adding a co-tenant or family member to log unit faults).
- Vendor Managers: Can invite and manage Vendor Technicians. This gives each vendor company control over its own field roster—adding or removing technicians as staff changes—without needing the estate Admin to intervene.
- Vendor Technicians: Cannot issue workspace invites.
Explore User Types and Permissions to see a breakdown of who can do what in the workspace.
