The three standard roles in Cobrief cover most needs. Sometimes they are not quite right: perhaps an external consultant should write bids without touching the knowledge base, or a finance manager should see the invoices without working on tenders.
With custom roles you build your own roles and decide what each one is allowed to do. The roles apply to the whole workspace, and you can give them to both new and existing users.
Custom roles require Ultra or Enterprise. On other plans you can see the roles that exist, but you cannot create or change them. Read more about roles and permissions.
Find the role overview
Click Settings (the gear icon at the bottom left).
Select "Manage users".
Click the "Roles" tab.
Here you will find every role in the workspace. Standard roles are marked Standard and can be opened to see what they can do, but not changed. Your own roles are marked Custom. The Users column shows how many people have the role, including invitations that have not been accepted yet.
Create a new role
Click "New role".
Give the role a name, for example "Bid manager". The name has to be unique, and you cannot reuse the names of the standard roles.
Turn on the permissions the role should have.
Click "Create role".
The role is ready immediately, and shows up in the dropdown when you invite someone or change a coworker's role.
What you can turn on
Every role starts from the same baseline: see tenders, search and comment. That means seeing tenders and bids in the workspace, searching, leaving comments and managing their own alerts. This cannot be turned off.
On top of the baseline you choose what the role can do in its own work:
Permission | What it gives |
Manage pipeline | Add tenders to the pipeline, change status and owner. |
Work on bids | Create and edit bids, tasks and bid documents. |
Use the AI agent | Chat, questions and drafts. |
Upload own files | Tender documents and attachments. |
Change the knowledge base | Add, edit and delete the files everyone in the workspace shares. |
And what the role can change on behalf of everyone else:
Permission | What it gives |
Search settings, alerts and statuses | Search profile, tender alerts for the whole workspace and pipeline statuses. |
Users and teams | Invite, remove and change roles. |
Subscription and billing | Change plan, see invoices and update payment details. |
Integrations and AI tools | Slack, SharePoint, Flowcase and skills for the AI agent. |
Users and teams effectively grants administrator access. Anyone who can change roles can also give themselves all the other permissions. Only give it to people you would make an administrator anyway.
Change or delete a role
Click the menu icon to the right of the role.
Edit lets you change the name and turn permissions on and off. The change applies to everyone with the role, and takes effect immediately.
Delete removes the role. If anyone already has it, you must choose which role they get instead. You can pick Administrator, Member or another custom role.
Contributor is not an option when you delete a role. Moving people down to free read-only access should be a deliberate choice you make under Users, not something that happens in passing.
How roles count in your subscription
Everyone with a custom role counts as a user in the subscription, the same way Administrator and Member do. That holds even if the role has few permissions.
If you want to give someone visibility without it costing anything, Contributor is still the right role. Contributors have their own included limits per plan.
Who can start the AI brief?
The AI brief summarises a tender and helps you evaluate it quickly. Anyone who can see the tender can start the brief on documents that are already there, including contributors and custom roles without upload permission.
If someone should upload the tender documents themselves, they need "Upload own files". Without that permission the upload is not shown at all, but the brief can still run on the documents that have been collected.
Frequently asked questions
Can a custom role do more than an administrator? No. The permissions in the role editor are the same ones the administrator role has, recombined. You cannot give a role something that does not already exist.
What happens to our roles if we move to a lower plan? The roles keep working, and people keep their permissions. You just cannot create new roles or change them until you are back on Ultra or Enterprise.
Can I see what a standard role can do? Yes. Open Administrator, Member or Contributor from the role list. The switches show what the role can do, but cannot be changed.
Can we control access to individual tenders? No. Access applies to the whole workspace. Everyone with access sees the same tenders.