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Roles place each user in your company’s reporting structure. In Salesforce, the role hierarchy lets managers see the records their teams own and roll up reports by team. In FieldKo, roles can also decide which reps a manager can plan for. This page explains what roles do, a typical structure for a retail field team, and what roles don’t control.

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User Permissions Needed

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What Roles Do

  • Record visibility up the hierarchy. Users can see, and usually edit, the records owned by users in roles below them. When a visit’s owner is a rep, the rep’s area manager, regional manager, and national manager can all see it, even if the visit’s org-wide default is Private. For custom objects, this depends on Grant Access Using Hierarchies, which is on by default.
  • Team reporting. Reports and dashboards can show “my team’s” records, so a regional manager sees coverage and call compliance for every rep in the region.
  • Sharing rules by role. Sharing rules can share records with a role, or with a role and its subordinates.
The FieldKo Manager Permission Set doesn’t grant access to all records. Managers see their reps’ visits, tasks, survey answers, and orders through the role hierarchy or through sharing rules. For details, see User Roles in Salesforce Help.

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A Typical Retail Field Structure

Most field teams map roles to geography. This structure works for many companies: Merchandisers usually sit at the rep level, in the same area as the reps they work alongside. Executives who only read reports can sit at the national level or in a separate role above it. Head office users who don’t manage reps don’t need to be in the field branch of the hierarchy at all. Keep the hierarchy close to how your teams actually report. Every role change and every move of a user to a new role makes Salesforce recalculate sharing, which can take time in large orgs. See Security Model and Sharing.

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How FieldKo Can Use Roles

FieldKo uses roles only when User Reporting Hierarchy on the FieldKo Configuration tab is set to Role. Then:
  • On screens such as Visit Calendar, Visit Planner, Call Planning, and Objectives, a manager can choose any rep in a role below their own, at every level.
  • If you turn on call plan change emails, FieldKo sends them to managers in the role directly above the rep’s role.
After install, the setting is Manager, which uses the Manager field on each user record instead. To choose between Manager, Role, and Public Group, see Set Up Manager Visibility.

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Roles Don’t Decide What Syncs to a Rep

A role can let a user see records in Salesforce, but it doesn’t put them on a rep’s device. FieldKo picks the records for each rep from its own rules:
  • Accounts sync when the rep owns them or is on the account team, or in public group mode, when they’re shared with the rep’s public groups.
  • Visits sync when the rep is the visit’s Sales Representative and the visit is in the date window.
  • Tasks, survey answers, orders, and ranging follow the rep’s visits and accounts.
A manager who uses the FieldKo Atlas app gets their own accounts and visits, not their whole team’s, even though they can see the team’s records in Salesforce. The exception is objects that FieldKo has no rule for, such as your own objects with no lookup to Account or Visit. For those, the app syncs every record the user can see, so a manager’s role does add records. See Rules for Each Object.

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Set Up Roles

To build the hierarchy:
  1. From Setup, in the Quick Find box, enter Roles, and then select Roles.
  2. Click Expand All to see the current hierarchy.
  3. Next to the parent role, click Add Role.
  4. Enter the Label, and check that This role reports to shows the right parent.
  5. Click Save.
  6. Repeat steps 3 to 5 for each role.
To assign a role, edit the user’s record, select the Role, and then save. Assign roles before reps start syncing, so managers can see their teams’ visits from day one.

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See Also

Last modified on October 20, 2026