Users and permissions
Invite team members, choose the right role for each person, change roles, and deactivate a user who leaves.
Do this whenever someone joins your shop, changes jobs, or leaves. Each person gets their own login with a role that controls what they can see and do — never share one login across the counter.
Invite a user
Open Settings → Users. In the sidebar, click Settings, then the Users & Access card. You'll see the Invite a Team Member card on top, then Team Members, and — if anyone has an invite outstanding — a separate Pending Invitations section below that.
Click Invite. The invite form opens with Email, Name, and Role fields.
Enter their work email. Use the address they'll actually sign in with — Meridian matches people to your shop by email, so a typo here means they can't get in.
Pick a role. There's no default — the dropdown starts on Select a role… and Send Invite stays disabled until you choose. The options are Owner, Manager, Service Advisor, Technician, Parts Clerk, Accounting and Viewer, each with a one-line description of what it covers. See "What each role can do" below.
Click Send Invite. Meridian confirms the address it went to and reminds you it's listed under Pending Invitations until they sign in. They get an email with a sign-in link.
What each role can do
In plain terms — the full detail lives in the permissions matrix:
- Owner — everything, including Settings, your Meridian subscription, and all accounting. Every shop must always have at least one owner.
- Manager — runs the shop day to day: orders, customers, scheduling, reports, and most of Settings (including inviting users). No subscription billing.
- Service Advisor — the front counter: writes orders and estimates, manages customers and vehicles, takes payments, triages customer portal requests. Can look at vendor returns but not create them.
- Technician — the most locked-down working role: their assigned orders, time clock, and inspections. No accounting, no purchasing, no Settings.
- Parts Clerk — inventory and purchasing: parts, purchase orders, receiving, transfers, and vendor returns up to and including shipping them. Sees what the shop pays vendors, because you can't buy parts without it — but not selling margin.
- Accounting — the money side: receivables, payables, statements, exports, and customer portal management. Records the vendor's credit when a return settles. Not orders.
- Viewer (read-only) — can look, can't touch. Good for a bookkeeper or silent partner.
Pick the role that matches the job. If someone needs a little more than their role allows, you can grant it to them individually — see fine-tuning one person's access — rather than working around it with a shared login.
Waiting on someone to accept
An invitation that hasn't been accepted lives in its own Pending Invitations section, not in the team roster — so Team Members only ever shows people who have actually signed in. Pending invites don't count toward your active users.
Each pending row has two actions:
- Re-send — sends the invitation email again. There's no confirmation step; one click and it's away.
- Revoke invitation — cancels it. Meridian asks you to confirm, and the row disappears. Unlike removing a team member, revoking genuinely deletes the invitation, because there's no history to keep yet.
Fine-tuning one person's access
Sometimes a role is nearly right. You can override two specific permissions per person, without moving them to a different role:
- Reopen closed orders — send a settled ticket back to In Progress, which reverses its invoice posting and the stock it consumed.
- See cost & margin — view part and labor cost, profit and GP% across the app, exports and reports.
Find the person in Team Members and click the sliders icon on their row (Permission overrides). A panel opens underneath.
Set each one to Role default, Always allow, or Never allow. The panel shows you what their role gives them and what the result will be, so you can see exactly what you're changing.
Click Save overrides. It takes effect immediately, and the change is recorded in the audit log with what it was before and after.
You can't change your own overrides — the control doesn't appear on your own row, and the server refuses it even if you go looking. That's deliberate: a Never allow beats your role, so editing your own would be a way to lock yourself out of your own shop.
Change someone's role
Find them in the Team Members list. Their current role shows as a colored badge next to their name.
Click the role badge. It turns into a dropdown of all roles, including Owner.
Pick the new role. The change applies immediately — the next page they load uses the new role. You can't change your own role, and an owner can't demote themselves; promote someone else to Owner first.
One person is protected: whoever set the shop up. The original owner's role and access can only be changed by them. If you try, Meridian tells you so — the controls are still on screen, but the change is refused.
Deactivate a user
When someone leaves, deactivate them — their history on orders and time entries stays intact, but they can no longer sign in to your shop.
Click the remove icon (the crossed-out person) at the right of their row in Team Members. Meridian confirms that they'll lose access but their history is kept.
Check the row. They now show dimmed with an (inactive) tag. If they come back, click Re-enable on the same row — no new invite needed.
What happens behind the scenes
Every invite, role change, and deactivation is recorded in your shop's audit log (Settings → Audit Log) with who did it and when. Deactivation is a soft removal — nothing the person created is deleted, and their name stays on the orders they wrote. A person can belong to more than one shop with the same email; inviting them here never touches their access elsewhere.
Troubleshooting
That email already has a row in your Team Members list — scroll down and look for it. If they show (inactive), click Re-enable instead of re-inviting. If they're active and pending, they just need to sign in with that exact email.
They signed in with a different email than the one you invited. Deactivate nothing — just have them sign out and sign back in using the exact invited address, or re-invite the address they actually use.
A login isn't enough — techs also need an employee record with the Technician box checked, linked to their login. See Employees for the two-minute fix.
For two things — reopening closed orders and seeing cost & margin — you can set it per person without changing their role. See fine-tuning one person's access. For anything else, choose the closest role that covers what they need (for example, move a senior advisor to Manager). If a role split doesn't fit your shop, tell us — this is exactly the feedback that shapes the roles.
They're under Pending Invitations instead — the roster only shows people who have signed in at least once. Use Re-send if the email went astray, or Revoke invitation if you invited the wrong address.
That's intentional. The person who set the shop up can only be changed by themselves, so a shop can't be locked out of its own account. If they've genuinely left, contact support.
Settings currently shows in the sidebar for everyone, but only owners and managers can open it — anyone else gets bounced to the dashboard without a message. That's expected, not a fault. If they need to be in there, they need one of those two roles.