Managing Function Roles
Create, rename, and delete the function roles people join teams under.
Function roles are the list of jobs your company does — Developer, Designer, QA, Account Manager. People join a team under one, log work under it, and reports break the hours down by it. What a function role is and how it is used day to day is covered in Teams and Function Roles; this article is about the pool itself, and who edits it.
JetTime ships with a starter set covering the usual jobs across a company, so nothing has to be configured before people start logging. Rename what doesn't match your wording, delete what you don't need, and add the roles you actually bill and report on.
Where Function Roles Live
Open the JetTime app, go to Settings, and under Roles and Permissions click Function Roles. The list has two columns, Name and Key, and the default role carries a Default tag.
Creating a Function Role
Click Create Function Role. The dialog has two fields.
Name: what people will see in the Role field of the Log Work form and in reports — Developer, Copywriter, Support Engineer.
Key: a short identifier, unique across your roles. It must start with a letter or underscore, and can contain letters, numbers, and underscores.
Click Save. The role is immediately available to every team.
To rename a role or change its key later, click the pencil at the end of its row.
What the Key Is For
The key identifies the role in the API and is stamped on every work log logged under it. The name is only a label — rename a role freely and every past work log follows it.
The key doesn't work that way. Change it and the work logs already carrying the old key stop resolving to this role, so they lose their role in reports until you change the key back. It's reversible, but it isn't cosmetic: pick a key you can live with, then edit the name whenever your wording changes.
The Default Role
One role in the list is the default, marked with a Default tag — it ships as Contributor. It is pre-selected whenever someone is added to a team, so a company that doesn't track what people do can leave everyone on it and never think about roles again.
Because it is the fallback, it behaves differently from the rest:
- It can be renamed. Change it to whatever your company calls that role.
- Its key is frozen. The Key field is disabled for the default role, so the role every new member lands on can never lose its history.
- It can't be deleted. There always has to be a role to fall back to.
Deleting a Function Role
Open a role with the pencil and click Delete in the dialog. Nothing blocks the deletion — instead, everyone who held that role in any team moves to the default role.
Their past work logs keep the deleted role's key, so recreating a role with that same key reconnects the history. If the role is one you may want back, that is the safety net.
A function role says what a person does; what they may see and manage is a permission role, set up in Configuring Permission Schemes. The two meet in one place: holding a function role in a team is what lets someone log work to it, however many permissions they have.
Additional Tips
- Editing the pool needs the View and Manage Settings global permission — see Managing Global Permissions.
- Keep the list short. A role earns its place when you want to see its hours separately on a report or an invoice; anything finer is noise in every Log Work form.
- A person can hold several function roles in one team, so you don't need combined roles like "Developer and QA" — add the person twice instead.