Roles, Permissions & Access

The access you and your members have to the various areas of your Our Cat Herder portal is driven by the Role each user is assigned.

In this section you can find out more about which roles have access to which parts of Our Cat Herder.

Click the role name in the left hand menu to find out more about the specific access privileges members assigned it have.

Recommended Role Setup

For most portals, we recommend a simple three-role approach:

Role	Who	Access Level
Admin	Whoever administers the primary board (2 people recommended)	Full access to everything
Member	Board/committee members	Can only see items they are specifically invited to
Staff	Staff who support the board	Can only see items they are specifically invited to

This setup keeps your permissions tight and gives you granular control over who can access what. It works particularly well if you run subcommittees, have external board members, or want to keep board and staff materials separate.

Why Two Admins?

We recommend having at least two Admin users on your portal. If one is unavailable (on leave, leaves the organisation, etc.), the other can still manage the portal, grant access, and handle any urgent issues.

The Member and Staff roles are highly restricted — members with these roles can only see meetings, discussions, decisions, and documents they have been explicitly invited to or given access to. This makes it easy to manage multiple committees and groups within a single portal without information crossing over.

While other roles (Chair, Secretary, Treasurer, CEO, etc.) are available and provide broader access levels, the three-role model above is the simplest and most flexible approach for most organisations. See the individual role pages in the left menu for detailed permissions.

One Role Per Member

We recommend assigning only one role per member. While multiple roles are possible, they can occasionally cause permission conflicts where a more restrictive role may override a less restrictive one.

Overview

What members can see in your Our Cat Herder portal is dynamic based on various factors.

Broadly a member on your portal can view all areas (with the exception of Billing, Settings & Activity Log which are restricted to members with the Admin role assigned).

However within the areas they can view, a member will be restricted in what they can see and access based on the assigned Role or other specific selections that have been made when setting a meeting, decision proposal etc...

Confidential Agenda Items and Roles

Confidential agenda items let a meeting exclude specific people from an item, for example to manage a conflict of interest or publicly excluded business. The feature is available on every portal and is not switched on or off by role.

• Who can make items confidential: the creator of the meeting and the chairperson of the meeting. This is set on each meeting, so holding the Admin or Chair role does not by itself give this ability.
• Who can be excluded: anyone, whatever their role, including Admins and members holding the Chair role. An excluded Admin cannot see the item, its sub-items or its attachments in that meeting.
• Self-exclusion: people cannot exclude themselves. The meeting chairperson can exclude the creator, and the creator can exclude the chairperson.

See Confidential Agenda Items for how it works.

See It In Action

Watch the Admin vs Staff Comparison video for a side-by-side walkthrough of what Admin and Staff users see across every area of the portal.