Admin: outlets, people and settings

Manage your outlets, departments, people, roles, and escalation settings from the admin console.

Admin is where an organisation sets up Operate: which outlets run it, the departments that organise work, the people who sign in, and the escalation settings that decide who gets emailed when things slip. It lives in the console sidebar under Admin config.

Only admins get here. The section is visible to the org-wide Maska admin and to anyone holding the Operate admin role. A manager without admin rights who lands on the page sees an “Admins only” notice instead — ask an admin at your organisation if you need a change.

The page has four tabs: Outlets, Departments, People, and Settings. The button in the top-right corner changes with the tab — Add outlet, New department, or Invite link and Add person.

Outlets

The Outlets tab lists every outlet subscribed to Operate as a card showing its name, code, type (Outlet, Central kitchen, Warehouse, or Cluster) and city. A dropdown filters between Active, Archived, and All — an archived outlet always carries an explicit Archived label, never just a different colour.

Adding an outlet. Click Add outlet. If your organisation already has outlets that aren’t on Operate yet (say, ones set up in Procurement), you first get a chooser with two paths:

Link an existing outlet — pick an outlet you already have from the list. Linking subscribes it to Operate straight away.
Create a new outlet — fill in a Name, a short Code (e.g. KMK), a Type, and an optional City, then click Add outlet. If the code is already taken you’ll see “Another outlet already uses this code” inline.

Any outlet added from Operate is subscribed to Operate automatically — there is no opt-out at creation.

The Operate switch. Each card carries an Operate on / Operate off switch. Turning it off unsubscribes the outlet from Operate — it stops running checklists and drops off this list (it comes back through Link an existing outlet). Clusters can’t run checklists, so their switch is locked.

Edit, archive, restore. Edit changes the outlet’s name, code, type, or city. Archive hides the outlet from the active list after a confirmation — its Operate subscription and history stay intact, and Restore brings it back any time.

Departments

Departments are the chips that organise checklists and log tasks — the same chip an admin sets here appears on tasks in the Builder and on staff rows. The tab shows one card per department (its emoji, name, and short label) plus a New department tile.

Clicking a card opens the department drawer, where you can edit the Name, an optional Short label (e.g. BKY), the Emoji, and a Tint for the chip. The drawer also offers Archive, which retires the department without deleting its history.

People

The People tab is the searchable roster of everyone with Operate access. Search matches name, phone, or email; a dropdown filters Active, Archived, or All. Each row shows the person’s name, a Manager badge where it applies, their role and outlet posting, and their department chips (“All departments” when they aren’t limited to any). As with outlets, an archived person carries an explicit Archived label.

Adding a person

Click Add person. The dialog is phone-first — type the phone number and Operate checks it against your organisation:

The phone matches someone you already have (from another Maska module, say): the dialog switches to Add existing person. They keep their existing PIN — you just pick their role, outlets, and departments.
The phone is new: enter their name too. Operate creates them and reveals a one-time temporary PIN.

Warning: The temporary PIN is shown once and can never be fetched again. Copy it and share it with the person before you click Done — they’ll sign in with it and be asked to set their own.

The role you pick decides the outlet posting: an org-wide role (like admin) needs no outlet, an outlet role needs exactly one, and a cluster role takes one or more. Departments are optional — leaving them all unticked means the person covers all departments.

Invite link

Invite link is the hands-off alternative: enter a name, phone, role, and optional outlet, and Operate gives you a shareable onboarding link to copy and send. The person sets themselves up when they open it.

Editing a person

Click any roster row to open the Edit person drawer. From one place you can change their name, phone, email, role, outlet posting, and departments, and reset their sign-in PIN. Reset PIN generates a new temporary PIN, revealed once with a Copy button — the same warning as above applies. Only the fields you actually changed are saved; if one part of a save fails, the drawer stays open and tells you which part, so you can retry just that.

Two guards protect you from locking yourself out:

You cannot archive your own account — the archive button is disabled on your own row.
In the drawer, you cannot change your own role or reset your own PIN.

Archiving and reactivating

The archive button at the end of each row deactivates a person after a confirmation — they lose access and drop off the active roster, but their history stays intact. Filter to Archived and use the restore button to Reactivate them with their old role and departments.

Roles and permissions

Operate ships with three roles, assigned per person on the People tab:

staff — the phone-first staff app: the Today board, logs, and maintenance reporting. See Your day in Operate.
manager — the Ops Console: monitoring, checklist building, escalations, and reports, but not this Admin section.
admin — everything a manager has, plus Admin config.

Each role also carries a fine-grained permission set behind the scenes (per area — checklists, tickets, logs, petty cash, reports, people — at levels from view-only up to full control); the defaults above are what those sets grant. There is no screen for editing a role’s permissions yet.

Note: The org-wide Maska admin marker sits above all of this. Someone marked as an organisation admin in Maska is an Operate admin automatically — they need no Operate role at all, and their access doesn’t depend on the role matrix. That’s why you may see full-console access for a person whose roster row shows no ops role.

Settings

The Settings tab configures the two-hop owner-escalation email flow for overdue tasks:

Manager escalation — Notify the manager after: how many minutes past its deadline a task must be before an escalation opens and the outlet’s on-call manager is emailed.
Owner escalation — an opt-in second hop. Switch on Escalate to the owner and set Notify the owner after: if the manager still hasn’t acted after that many minutes (counted from when the manager was first notified), the organisation owner is emailed too.

Both windows take whole minutes (1 or more); click Save changes to apply. Only the owner can change these settings — the save is rejected for anyone else. For what happens after an escalation opens — tiers, the queue, resolving and waiving — see Escalations.

Replaying the onboarding tours

Under Settings > Help, the Take the tour buttons replay the guided console tours (checklists, live tasks, escalations, your cluster and search) whenever you want a refresher — for example after a new feature lands. Staff have the same replay on their Me tab as Take the tour again.