Roles and access

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The website shows you only what your roles unlock

Two members can sign in to the same website and see different menus. That is not a fault — the site hides what you cannot use rather than showing you links that would turn you away. Your roles are worked out fresh every time you sign in. Most come from Schedulemaster automatically; a few are granted by a club administrator.

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The roles that come from Schedulemaster

You do not apply for these and nobody assigns them by hand. The website reads your Schedulemaster record at sign-in and works them out. Two things follow from “worked out at sign-in”, and they account for most of the surprises:

• A new role does not appear until your next sign-in. Become an instructor on Monday and My CFI Profile appears the first time you sign in after that — not the moment the club updates Schedulemaster.
• The same is true in reverse. A role you have lost stays visible until your session ends.

An instructor who is also an owner gets both sets of tools. The roles stack.

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Board of Directors

Directors get one extra area: the club’s photo contest administration, where they review entries and cast their ballot for the judged placements. This role follows your seat on the board. It is granted from the club’s board roster rather than handed out individually, and it goes away when you leave the board or your membership is retired. Directors are read-only across that area with a single exception — casting their own ballot. Running a contest, opening and closing a ballot, and applying the result stay with site administrators. Directors also cannot enter the photo contest themselves, for the obvious reason.

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Administrator roles

Club administration is split into separate roles so that helping with one job does not hand you the keys to every other one. A member who manages gift certificates does not thereby get the member roster, and vice versa. These are granted by a site administrator in the club’s access management tool, and they take effect immediately — no sign-out needed. Each area has a broad role and one or more narrow ones. Giving somebody Gift Certificate Admins lets them work on gift certificates and nothing else; Finance Admins covers the whole finance area. Every administrator role requires an active membership. If a member’s membership is retired, their administrator access stops working — the roles are still recorded, but nothing unlocks until the membership is active again.

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Why a menu item is missing

Work down this list. The first two account for most of it.

1. You have not signed in since the role was granted. Sign out, sign back in. This is the answer for every Schedulemaster-derived role: active member, instructor, aircraft owner.
2. Your membership is not active. Retired members keep their sign-in but lose every member and administrator tool. If you land on a “Welcome back… your membership is retired” page, that is what has happened.
3. You were never given that role. Administrator roles are granted one at a time. Holding one does not imply another.
4. You are looking in the wrong branch of the menu. The menu groups admin tools by who uses them, which is not always where you would expect a tool to sit. The photo contest tools, for example, live under Board of Directors rather than with the other membership tools.

If none of those explain it, ask — see Getting help. Say which item you expect and when you last signed in; that is usually enough to settle it in one reply.

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For administrators granting roles

A few rules that are easy to trip over:

• Grant the narrowest role that does the job. The split exists so that a volunteer helping with one task is not handed the member roster as well.
• Changes take effect immediately. The member does not need to sign out and back in — unlike the Schedulemaster-derived roles, which do.
• Grant roles only in the club’s access management tool. It is the one place a grant sticks. Membership, instructor, and owner roles are rebuilt from Schedulemaster every time a member signs in, so a role recorded anywhere else is overwritten at their next sign-in.
• Board of Directors is not granted in the access tool. It follows the board roster and is managed there instead.

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