Users, Roles & Permissions
Give each staff member exactly the access their job needs — and nothing beyond it.
Everyone who signs in to DRAIS is a user. What they can see and do comes from their role. Getting this right early is worth the twenty minutes it takes, because it is much harder to take access away later than to grant it in the first place.
Users, roles and permissions
| User | One person with a sign-in. A teacher, the bursar, the headteacher. |
| Role | A named job — Teacher, Bursar, Director of Studies. A role carries a set of permissions, and users are given roles rather than individual permissions. |
| Permission | One specific ability, such as viewing results or recording a payment. DRAIS has around 170, grouped by area. |
You will spend nearly all your time working with roles. Permissions matter when you want to build a role that does not already exist.
The built-in roles
| Super Admin | Everything, including managing other users. Usually the director or head. Keep the number of Super Admins small — two is sensible, so nobody is locked out if one is unavailable. |
| Admin | Day-to-day administration across most areas, without user management. |
| Director of Studies | Academics: subjects, exams, marks, report cards. |
| Teacher | Their classes: marks entry, attendance, learner profiles. |
| Bursar | Finance: fee structures, payments, receipts, balances. |
| Receptionist | Admissions and front-desk work, without finance or results. |
These are starting points. Every one can be adjusted, and you can create your own.
Adding a staff member
- 1
Add them under Staff
Name, role at the school, contact details. This is their staff record. - 2
Create their user account
Give them an email or username. They will set their own password on first sign-in. - 3
Assign a role
Pick the closest built-in role. Adjust afterwards if their job does not fit neatly. - 4
Have them sign in once while you are there
Ten seconds of checking now prevents a support call in the middle of mark entry week.
[ Screenshot: Staff list with roles ]
Replace with actual screenshot
Creating your own role
Go to Settings → Roles and create a role. Permissions are shown as a tree grouped by area, so you tick what the role should be able to do.
Permissions come in pairs across most areas — view and manage. View lets someone look; manage lets them change. A common and useful role is one with view across several areas and manage in none, for a deputy who needs oversight rather than control.
You can grant an entire area rather than ticking each permission inside it. Doing so means the role automatically gains any new ability added to that area in future — usually what you intended when you decided "the bursar handles finance".
Deciding who gets what
Three rules that save trouble:
Start narrow
Give the minimum that lets someone do their job, and widen when they ask. Starting wide means nobody ever asks, and you find out the scale of the access during an incident.
Separate money from marks
The person entering results and the person recording payments should rarely be the same person with the same login. This is ordinary good practice and DRAIS makes it easy.
Do not share accounts
A shared staffroom login destroys the audit trail — every action becomes "someone". Individual accounts cost nothing and are the difference between knowing who changed a mark and guessing.
Disable their account the same day. Their record and everything they entered remains; only the ability to sign in ends. Do not delete the user — that would obscure the history of what they did.
Modules: a separate control
Alongside permissions, DRAIS has modules — optional areas such as Tahfiz, Payroll or Examinations. These are enabled per school as part of your subscription.
The two controls answer different questions:
| Permission | Is this person allowed to do it? |
| Module | Does this school have it at all? |
A module that is not enabled is unavailable to everyone, including Super Admins. That is intentional — modules reflect what your school has subscribed to, not seniority. See Settings & Modules.
The audit log
Settings → Audit Log records significant actions: who did what, when, and from where. Use it when a mark changed unexpectedly, a learner disappeared from a list, or a payment does not look right.
Checking the audit log first usually turns a mystery into an ordinary conversation with a colleague.