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SignaUnit is owner-first. HQ aligns owners on outcomes; owners run their businesses and decide who sees what.
The roles
| Role | Who | Can |
|---|---|---|
| HQ admin | The franchisor’s system owner | Manage the organization, users, roles and settings |
| HQ manager | Operations leaders | Author, open for feedback, publish, pause and archive priorities; read the rollup; approve waivers |
| Field consultant | Franchise business consultants | See their units’ priorities and follow-up lists, coach owners, run audits, verify fixes, recommend waivers |
| Franchise owner | The franchisee’s owner or principal | See and acknowledge priorities, log progress, add notes, comment and vote on drafts, own corrective actions, grant access within their business |
| Owner’s delegate | Someone the owner chooses, such as a general manager | See the priorities the owner shares with them and log progress for the owner, if the owner allows it |
| Viewer | Leadership, finance | Read the rollup, nothing else |
A person can hold more than one role, for example a field consultant across two regions, or an owner of two franchisees.
Scope
Every role is granted at a scope: the whole tenant, a region, a franchisee or a unit. Scope flows down the tree:
- An HQ manager scoped to a region sees everything under that region, and nothing outside it.
- A field consultant sees the regions or franchisees they’re assigned.
- A franchise owner sees only their own franchisee’s units.
- An owner’s delegate sees only what the owner has shared, for the units the owner chose.
Permissions are checked in the API on every request, by role and scope. Underneath that, the database enforces the tenant boundary on its own. See Security and data isolation.
Owner-first by design
Franchisors have a legitimate interest in brand standards and in results. They should not be directing how a franchisee’s employees work. SignaUnit is built around that distinction: standardize outputs, not inputs. In practice:
- HQ invites owners only. HQ and field consultants invite franchise owners. They don’t invite, hold rosters of, or manage accounts for franchisee employees.
- Owners grant access. If an owner wants a general manager to see their priorities, the owner adds them, and can remove them at any time. Those priorities appear to the delegate as the owner’s priorities, not as instructions from HQ.
- Every HQ touchpoint addresses the owner. Priorities, reminders, escalations, corrective actions and verifications go to the owner. Reminders never go to franchisee staff.
- HQ views stop at the unit. The rollup aggregates by unit, franchisee and region. HQ can’t see which individual tapped acknowledge or logged a value, only that the business did.
- No per-person activity for HQ. HQ roles can’t see per-user activity, last-seen times or usage by individual franchisee-side users. Usage is reported to HQ only as unit or franchisee totals, and web session recording is off for franchisee-side users.
- Notes are private by default. Owner notes stay inside the franchisee’s business unless the owner chooses to share one with HQ.
- Outcome language. Priorities describe results (“reply to 90% of new reviews within two days”), with HQ’s reason and optional recommendations from peers who got there. Authoring hints flag staff-directed phrasing, such as instructions addressed to employees, before HQ publishes.
SignaUnit doesn’t decide who in a unit does what, or when. That’s the owner’s choice.
SignaUnit is designed around standardizing outcomes. It isn’t legal advice. Your franchise counsel should review your own priorities, audit templates and agreements.
Field consultants
Field consultants are the human side of follow-through. In SignaUnit they:
- Work a follow-up list of units that are behind, ranked by outcome.
- Run audits and open corrective actions, which are owned by the franchise owner.
- Verify or reopen fixes, judging the result.
- Recommend waivers when a priority doesn’t fit a unit.
- Hold the coaching conversation with the owner through comments.
When a comment from HQ or a field consultant names an employee or gives a staff instruction, SignaUnit prompts the author to coach the owner on the result instead.
Support access
Occasionally the SignaUnit support team needs to see what a user sees in order to fix a problem. Support access is restricted to SignaUnit support staff, requires a reason, is time-boxed, and is fully recorded in the audit log. HQ admins can’t impersonate franchisee-side users.
Audit trail
Every role change, invite, publish, override, waiver and verification is recorded with who did it and when. HQ admins can review the log for their tenant.
Sign-in methods
- HQ users: Continue with Google. HQ single sign-on through SAML or OIDC, with SCIM for automatic deprovisioning, is Planned.
- Owners and delegates: email invite, then Continue with Google with the invited address. Personal Gmail addresses are fine, and no corporate single sign-on is assumed.
- Other methods: email sign-in links, passkeys, Face ID unlock and Sign in with Apple are Planned. Sign-in at app.signaunit.com isn’t open yet.