What each permission controls

Scout has 34 permissions, grouped into eight sections on Settings → Permissions. Most are obvious from their label. Four are not, and those four are the ones churches ask about, so they get the second half of this article.

The full list, by group

People

• Edit person records (edit_people): edit profiles and contact info.
• View pastoral notes (view_notes): read notes on a person's profile.
• Write pastoral notes (write_notes): add them.

Giving

• View giving data (view_giving): see who has given, how much, and giving trends.
• Record offline donations (record_donations): log a cash or check gift by hand.
• Refund donations (refund_donations).
• Manage funds (manage_funds): create and edit giving funds.

Insights

• View attendance data (view_attendance).
• View Scout's insights & engagement (view_intelligence).
• View reports (view_reports).
• View patterns (view_patterns).
• Review flagged people (manage_signals): resolve people from the worklists once they have been followed up with.

Community

• View groups (view_groups) and Create & edit groups (manage_groups).

Serving

• View serving teams (view_teams) and Create & edit serving teams (manage_teams).
• View serving schedule (view_serving_schedule).
• Build services & Run of Show (manage_services).
• Assign volunteers to slots (assign_volunteers).

Check-In

• View check-in (view_check_in) and Manage rooms & sessions (manage_check_in).
• Release children at pickup (release_children): verify a family and release children, from the member app or the kiosk.

Outreach

• View forms (view_forms) and Create & edit forms (manage_forms).
• View events (view_events) and Create & edit events (manage_events).
• View workflows (view_pathways) and Create & edit workflows (manage_pathways). The keys still say "pathways" because they are stored per role; renaming them would strip access from every existing role.
• Post church updates (post_updates).

Admin

• Import data (CSV, PCO) (import_data) and Export data (export_data).
• Invite users & assign roles (invite_team).
• Edit church settings (manage_settings).
• View audit log (view_audit_log).

The four worth understanding properly

Turning one of these off does more than close a page, so read this before you build a role around one.

View giving data

Closing giving closes more than the Giving area, because giving data appears on screens gated by other permissions and Scout strips it wherever it goes.

Without it, a person loses: the whole Giving area, the giving section of a person's profile and its row in the engagement snapshot, giving totals on the dashboard, the giving section of every report, and giving highlights in Scout's insights.

View pastoral notes

Without it, a person's profile drops the entire pastoral record: the notes, the open and completed follow-ups, and the composer. Prayer requests are removed from the dashboard, and the queue rows that come from notes disappear with them.

One thing deliberately stays visible: the fact that contact happened. A line like "Nic followed up · Aug 4" shows to anyone who can open the profile, without the note behind it, so two staff members do not call the same person on the same afternoon.

View Scout's insights & engagement

This is the one that turns Scout from a church management system into a filing cabinet, so decide it deliberately.

Without it: Lists closes, the Who hears what and Ministry areas links vanish from Settings, and the dashboard loses at-risk people, highlights, church health, prayer requests, and serving-strain rows. On a person's profile the charcoal card reads "Scout is listening" and the engagement snapshot shows no status and no trend.

It is also the read gate for how notices are routed, so someone without it cannot see or edit your ministry areas. See Deciding who hears what.

View attendance data

The thinnest of the four, and the most misread. It gates church-wide participation numbers, and it changes exactly two things on screen: the dashboard's pulse line loses its "in the room Sunday" figure, and the steady-participation clause is suppressed.

It does not gate the Check-in area, which runs on View check-in instead. And it is not a per-person record of who was in the room on Sunday, because Scout has no such model. What Scout has is event check-ins, group-meeting attendance, children's check-ins, and anonymous headcounts.

Reading the grid

On Settings → Permissions, pick a role pill and tick or untick a box. Each checkbox saves on its own the moment you click it. There is no Save, no Cancel, and no confirmation before you remove something from a role that people are currently holding.

The change reaches the affected people on their very next request, so nobody needs to sign out.

The Permissions tab is Admin only, and that is the Admin role itself rather than a permission. A Pastor can invite people and assign roles but cannot change what a role means.

What roles do not do

Scout never hides a sidebar item because of a role. Everyone sees the same nav, and a closed area announces itself with an access-denied page when they click it. If you are handing someone a narrow role, tell them what it covers.

See also How roles work and Creating a custom role.