Changing User Roles in Shelf

You can change a team member's role in place from your workspace settings. The change takes effect immediately, and the user keeps their account, their history, and their place in the workspace.

Changing a Role

Go to Workspace settings → Team → Users
Find the user and click the Actions menu on their row
Choose Change role
Pick the new role: Administrator, Self service, or Base
Click Change role

That's it. The user's permissions update straight away, and they don't need to accept anything or sign in again.

Lowering a Role

Moving someone down a level, for example from Administrator to Self service, is treated as a demotion. Because the lower roles can't own workspace-wide records, the dialog asks where those records should go before it lets you continue.

Shelf shows you exactly what will move:

Assets, kits, categories, tags, locations, custom fields, asset reminders, and images the user created
Bookings created for others, meaning bookings this user set up with someone else as the custodian

Pick a Transfer entities to recipient from the dropdown. The workspace owner is preselected, and any other member of the workspace can be chosen instead. If the user owns nothing, the dialog says there is nothing to transfer and you can go ahead.

The user keeps their own bookings. Only bookings they created for a different custodian move to the recipient. Their own reservations and their own drafts stay with them and remain visible to them after the change.

Raising a role, for example from Base to Administrator, transfers nothing. Nothing needs to move, so there is no extra step.

Who Can Change a Role

Administrators and the workspace owner can change roles.
You cannot change your own role. Ask another administrator or the owner.
Only the workspace owner can change an Administrator's role. One administrator cannot demote another.
Making someone the workspace owner is a separate action. The roles above do not include owner. To hand ownership to another administrator, see Transferring Workspace Ownership.
Users managed through SSO cannot be changed here. Their role comes from the group mapping in your identity provider, so make the change there instead. See SSO with Google Workspace.

Revoking Access Instead

Revoke access, in the same Actions menu, is a different action: it removes the person from the workspace rather than adjusting what they can do. They become a Non-Registered Member (NRM), which keeps all their assets, custody records, and history intact, and you can invite them back later from the Non-Registered Members section.

Use Change role when someone stays on the team with different permissions, and Revoke access when they are leaving.

Who Can Revoke Access

Revoking is the stronger of the two actions, so it follows the same hierarchy as changing a role:

Administrators and the workspace owner can revoke a Base or Self-service user.
Only the workspace owner can revoke an Administrator. For an administrator, the menu item is greyed out with the reason on hover: "Only the workspace owner can revoke an Administrator's access."
The workspace owner's access cannot be revoked by anyone, including the owner. Shelf answers with "This user owns the workspace. Transfer ownership to someone else first, then revoke their access." This is deliberate: revoking the owner would leave the workspace with no one able to manage billing or hand ownership on, and there is no way back through the interface. Transfer ownership first, then revoke.
You cannot revoke your own access.

The same rule holds when memberships are managed by your identity provider. If SSO deprovisioning tries to remove the person who owns the workspace, the request fails rather than stranding the workspace — transfer ownership first, then deprovision.

Transferring Workspace Ownership: make another administrator the workspace owner, a separate and permanent action
User Types / Roles and Their Permissions: what each role can and cannot do
Configure What Self Service and Base Users Can See: fine-tune visibility for the lower roles
Onboarding Your Team Members: inviting people and picking a starting role

For any questions about changing user roles, reach out to our support team at support@shelf.nu.