Functional roles catalog

Functional roles answer one question about a customer account: who does what? Who is its Sales owner, who runs Operations, who handles Billing. Once an account has a team, Linbis uses it — inbound email routes to the right person, and shipments and quotes inherit the team instead of being assigned by hand.

Note — Functional roles are not permissions. They route work; they never grant access. Who can see and edit an account is Account Access, a separate panel. The two sit side by side on the account's More tab because they answer different questions.

Define your roles

Settings → Functional Roles (/settings/functional-roles) is the catalog, and it is yours to shape. Linbis seeds the usual set — Sales, Customer Service, Operations, Pricing Desk, Billing, Trade Compliance, Documentation — and you can rename any of them to your own vocabulary, add ones you need, and archive ones you do not.

Archiving is deliberately not deletion. An archived role stops being assignable, but history survives: an email routed by a role keeps the role's label as it stood when the decision was made, so renaming or retiring a role later never rewrites why something was assigned.

Choose which roles are required

Mark the roles you consider mandatory. That choice is what Role coverage measures against — an account missing a required role is a gap you can act on, rather than a number nobody agreed the meaning of.

Put people in the roles

Open any account and use the Functional Roles panel, on both the Overview and More tabs. Each role gets a row: Assign adds a holder, the bin icon removes one. A role with nobody in it shows a plain "No Sales owner — assign" prompt, so gaps are visible instead of silent. A holder who receives routed email carries a receives routed email badge.

What the team then does for you

Inbound email. When an email resolves to an account, its classification decides which role should own it — a quote request goes to Sales — and it is assigned to whoever holds that role on that account. The Owners bar shows who owns it and why: Sales · via account. If nobody holds the matching role, the email is left unassigned rather than given to an arbitrary person.

Shipments and quotes. A shipment shows Who's working this. By default the team is inherited from the shipment's customer account and reads from account: <name>. Override a role to pin someone for that shipment only; everything you do not override keeps following the account.

Finding work. On the Shipments and Quotes lists open Filters → TEAM, pick a role and optionally a person under Held by. The list narrows to what that person owns in that role, counting inherited holders as well as explicit ones. The Table view carries the role as a column, marking inherited holders via account.

Related

• Role coverage — which accounts are missing which roles
• Role departures — hand a leaver's work to someone else
• Accounts screen reference