Roles are a feature of Advanced Permissions that you will use to create a hierarchy of viewing permissions. When you've set your organization-wide sharing to private, roles higher up the ladder can view items that are owned by or assigned to roles that report up to them through the hierarchy.
For example, if the Salesperson role reports to a Regional Sales Manager role, and that role reports to a Sales Director role, anything created by or assigned to the sales managers and the salespeople would be visible to the director.
Roles affect every view of a user's records. A user will only be able to send mass email, create reports, or export data for records that they have permission to see.
Roles and sharing rules will only work for a record type when you have organization-wide sharing set to Private.
Planning your role assignments
As you define each role, the question to ask is always: Whose records should the role be able to see down through the hierarchy?
There are many ways you can map out the roles you'll add to Insightly. One method is to start with a general hierarchy and split it into specific roles.
One example is: CEO > Directors > Managers > Staff
You can then split these up into roles by region or responsibility.
Starting with directors, we can ask: "Should all directors be able to see the records of all managers and staff?" If the answer is no, then we know we need to split things down the line. We might have Directors of Operations, Sales, and Finance all reporting up to the CEO.
We then continue: "Should all managers be able to see the records of all other managers and staff?" Probably not. We might have Managers of Operations, Finance, Western Sales and Eastern Sales, and so on.
Eventually we'll have the staff split up into the groups that each manager needs access to.
You can also reverse this method by starting with your org chart and grouping together roles that will have the same access to data.
Once your plan is ready, see Configuring roles in Advanced Permissions to get your roles set up.