Roles and Permissions

Access model

SophMate should be rolled out by job responsibility, not by convenience. Administrators may need settings and diagnostics, support users may need Knowledge Base and reply drafts, marketers may need campaign and Image Studio workflows, and developers may need Theme Assistant, tools, and App Center access. Avoid granting broad access when a narrower role can do the work.

High-risk areas

Provider keys, budgets, approvals, custom tools, agents, workflow execution, Theme Assistant publishing, and WooCommerce write actions should be restricted. The approval controls docs explain the review model, while the roles tutorial provides a practical rollout checklist.

Maintenance

Review permissions after staff changes, agency handoffs, new custom tools, new agents, and production incidents. Any unexpected access to customer, payment, coupon, provider, or system settings should be escalated before the user continues.

Quick reference

• Use this page when changing provider, budget, role, mail, queue, cron, source, cache, or WooCommerce context settings.
• Do not store secrets, credentials, purchase codes, or private customer data in documentation notes or screenshots.

Scope limits

• This page does not replace provider, host, mail, billing, security, or legal policy review where those owners are responsible.
• Use it to frame configuration decisions, not to store secrets or justify broad access.

Owner and cadence

• Primary owner: site administrator with provider, billing, and security responsibility.
• Review cadence: after provider, mailbox, role, budget, security, WooCommerce, or integration changes.
• Escalate when a setting grants high-risk access, changes provider spend, weakens privacy posture, or redirects alerts away from monitored owners.

Access and data boundary

• Restrict provider keys, billing, budgets, roles, mail routing, queues, cron, cache, and integration settings to accountable administrators.
• Document setting intent and validation results without storing API keys, mailbox passwords, purchase codes, raw logs, or private customer records.

Production checklist

• Separate conversation access from approval, execution, provider, budget, diagnostics, and custom-tool access.
• Review role mappings after staff changes, agency handoffs, incidents, and new modules.
• Document who owns provider credentials, budget limits, role access, notification routing, and ongoing review.
• Keep configuration changes behind administrator access and review them after plugin updates, staff changes, or incidents.

Acceptance checks

• Each role can perform its job without seeing unrelated high-risk controls.
• Unexpected access to customer, payment, provider, or system settings has an escalation path.
• A second administrator can explain why each high-risk setting is enabled and who may change it.
• No production credential, support mailbox, or notification path depends on an unmanaged personal account.

Failure modes to test

• Test invalid credentials, exhausted budget, unmonitored mailbox, wrong role mapping, queue delay, cron failure, and cache-dependent behavior.
• Confirm configuration failures are visible to an owner without exposing provider keys, mailbox credentials, or raw logs.

Evidence to capture

• Record changed setting, previous value category, new value category, owner, approval reason, and review date without storing secrets.
• Capture provider, budget, role, mailbox, queue, cron, cache, and WooCommerce evidence relevant to the setting being changed.

Decision record

• Record the configuration decision, setting owner, previous setting category, new setting category, validation result, approval reason, and next review date.
• Include whether the change affects provider spend, privacy, mail delivery, queue or cron behavior, WooCommerce context, or user permissions.

Stop or rollback path

Pause setting changes until the owner, previous state, new state, and validation evidence are recorded.

Monitoring window

• Monitor the next operating cycle for unexpected spend, blocked work, missed notifications, queue delays, or changed provider behavior.
• Compare the setting change against audit records, diagnostics, and user reports before making another related change.

Expansion criteria

• Widen the setting change only after audit records, user reports, diagnostics, and cost or delivery signals match expectations.
• The owner can explain how to reverse or narrow the change without searching through unrelated settings.

Common mistakes

• Using personal provider keys, personal mailboxes, or broad administrator access because it is faster during setup.
• Changing budgets, roles, notifications, or integrations without recording the owner and review reason.

Common questions

What is the main decision this page supports?

The page helps the team decide whether ownership, evidence, access, failure handling, monitoring, and rollback are clear enough for production use.

Who should own this decision?

The site administrator should own the decision, with provider, billing, security, mail, or hosting owners involved when their systems are affected.

What should stop the rollout?

Stop when a setting changes spend, access, privacy, mail, queue, cron, cache, provider behavior, or WooCommerce behavior without validation evidence.

Related operations

• Review Agency Governance for client-site rollouts.
• Use Cost Allocation and Client Billing Review before client or team billing reviews.
• Use Security and Key Rotation before changing provider credentials.
• Use Cache Queue and Performance before scaling workflows or alerts.
• Use Scheduled Task and Cron Reliability before relying on recurring work.
• Use Provider Models and Fallbacks before changing production model behavior.
• Use Data Residency and Provider Policy Review before sending sensitive context.
• Use Provider Rate Limits and Retry Planning before high-volume workflows.