Documentation › Roles › Owner
Role guide
- Company settings — legal name, tax details, pay schedule, funding bank account.
- Locations — adding, naming and setting the address of each site.
- Management accounts — creating location managers and payroll managers, and turning access off when someone leaves.
- Employee records — hiring, pay changes and status changes across every location.
- Paperwork on someone’s behalf — completing an employee’s forms for them, and I-9 Section 2 verification. Both are recorded against your account.
- Package upgrades — once approved, the Upgrade item in your menu is yours alone.
- Final say on payroll — you can submit yourself, and act when a manager is unavailable.
Company details
Legal name and EIN must match what the IRS has on file, character for character. A mismatch doesn’t fail at the moment you save — it fails weeks later as a rejected filing.
Pay schedule
Your pay frequency and pay dates determine the periods you’ll see all year. Changing a pay schedule mid-year affects withholding calculations, so treat it as a decision rather than a setting.
Locations
Add one location per physical site, with the street address you actually operate from. The address does more work than it looks like it does:
- It defines what a location manager can see. A manager assigned to a site sees that site’s people and nothing else.
- It groups hours for approval, so each site’s numbers are confirmed by the person who supervised the work.
- Where location-based clock-in is enabled, it anchors the area staff must be inside to clock in.
| If the person… | Use | They get |
|---|
| Is paid by you and works shifts | Add employee | An employee record, an onboarding checklist, and a login |
| Administers the system but isn’t on your payroll | Management wizard | A login with a management role, and no employee record |
| Is both — a director you also pay | Both, with two email addresses | One employee record and one separate management login |
Choosing the role
- Location manager — one per site. Reviews, corrects and approves that site’s hours. Full guide.
- Payroll manager — company-wide, runs payroll, never edits hours. Full guide.
- Employee — clocks in, completes their own paperwork. Full guide.
A location can only have one active location manager. If you try to assign a second, BrightBridge tells you who currently holds the site.
When someone leaves
Turning off access and ending employment are two separate actions on two separate records, and you usually need both. Disabling the login stops them signing in immediately. It does not end their employment record or close out their final pay.
Reading the approval status
Before any payroll is submitted, the payroll screen shows where each location stands. A site’s status comes from its individual approvals — it’s complete when its manager has approved everyone, not when someone presses a separate button.
Submitting with a location outstanding
You can. BrightBridge warns you rather than blocking you, because a manager on vacation shouldn’t stop everyone getting paid. If you do, chase the missing approval afterwards and expect a correction if it turns out to be wrong.
When a finalized period reverts to draft
If anyone re-approves hours after the period was finalized, the finalization automatically reverts and the screen tells you. This is working as designed: the numbers you finalized are no longer the numbers on file, and someone should look before submitting.
- Onboarding collects what the hiring form doesn’t: I-9, handbook sign-offs, certifications.
- Compliance items track things that expire — CPR, first aid, background checks, fingerprinting.
- Alerts surface before expiry, not after. Treat the alert list as this week’s to-do rather than a report.
New hires stay in an onboarding state until their required tasks are complete, then become active. Reopening a task later doesn’t push them backwards — it shows in the compliance score instead.
