Roles

1. What are roles?

As an admin user, you can set up roles for your site to group team members by skill set, seniority, experience, responsibilities, or other criteria. You can then define hourly charge-out rates for roles to track revenue or use roles in your resource planning workflow.

One of the main functions of roles is to support a role-based approach to pricing, in which the exact price of the service depends on who actually performs the work. 

For example, as a Senior Designer’s salary is higher than a Junior Designer's, you may want to charge more for a Senior Designer’s work.

By setting up respective roles and role prices, these different roles can collaborate on the same task, and every minute they log will be recorded with their corresponding hourly charge-out rate, i.e., the role's selling price. 

Roles cover the entire project lifecycle in Scoro – you can sell, track, and bill your services with role prices. After setting up roles and role prices, you can easily:

• Create a budget for your project using role prices and labor costs
  • Apply role selling rates on quotes to price services accordingly
  • Estimate service delivery costs based on role-based labor rates
• Track revenue based on role prices 
  • Instantly see the revenue you’ve earned based on any work already completed by people in different roles
  • In case of fixed fee or retainer projects, keep an eye on how much budget you still have left, as you see burndown in real time based on role prices
• Bill for time based on role prices
  • Each time entry automatically takes the correct selling price of the doer upon invoicing
• Plan resources based on roles
  • Use roles as placeholder members when booking resources for projects to understand availability and utilization on a role level

2. Role management permissions

Roles can be created and managed under Settings > Sales and finance > Roles by users who have the Manage roles permission enabled in their permission set.

2. How to set up roles?

Each site user must be assigned to a role. If you have not set up roles on your site yet, all site users will initially be assigned to the generic Placeholder role. Once you’ve created the actual roles in your company and assigned the correct role for each team member, you can simply delete the generic placeholder role.

To create a new role:

1. Go to Settings > Sales and finance > Roles and click the New button. You’ll be taken to the role modify view.
2. Enter the role name and initials. Role initials are visible in the role avatar, the same way as the initials for user avatars.
3. Enter the selling prices for different price lists in the Price list section. The selling price is the hourly rate you charge your client when someone in this role is working on their project. The prices defined here will be used by default for revenue calculation and time-billing in every project where you choose to apply role-based prices, but you can always change these values on the Project level whenever you need. 
   • If the price of the service varies depending on the nature of the project or if you do business in several currencies, you can also set up multiple price lists for your site.
   • If you haven’t set up price lists for your site yet, you can set them up first, and then simply modify the roles to assign selling prices to each price list you created.
4. Add the site users with this role in the Users section. You can assign as many users to a role as you wish, but each user can have only one role.

3. Setting up labor costs for each role

Once you’ve assigned the relevant roles to all your team members and set the role selling prices, you can proceed to set the labor costs for each role. Role labor rates are used in quotes to estimate service delivery costs and set target margins, even if you don’t yet know which team member will deliver the service.

If you haven’t set an individual labor cost for a team member, Scoro will use the role-level labor cost as the default one for all cost calculations.

Learn more about labor costs.

4. Using roles for pricing, revenue tracking, and time-billing

Once roles and labor costs are set up, they become the engine for your project finances. Use them for:

• Role-based quoting: Use role-based selling prices and labor rates when budgeting your proposal.
• Revenue tracking: Monitor project income in real-time. With the role-based pricing method, revenue is calculated based on the role prices of people performing the work.
• Automated time-billing: Bill your clients based on role prices. Each time entry automatically inherits the correct rate, ensuring your invoices are always accurate.

To learn more about how prices are applied, see our articles on Creating a quote and the Quoted vs Actual table.

Example: The complete role-based workflow

Let’s walk through an example of a web design project to see how roles function from the initial quote to the final invoice:

1. Setting up price lists and roles:
   We’ve enabled roles and assigned each team member to their respective role (e.g., Junior Designer, Senior Designer). We’ve also set up different price lists and defined the respective role prices across multiple currencies.
   
2. Creating a quote:
   Let’s suppose a client wants to order a web design project. We estimate it would take around 80 hours of work and will involve a junior and a senior designer to split the workload.
   • Pricing method: We select ‘Role prices’, so the service price depends on who does the work.
     
   • Custom role selling price: By default, Scoro uses role prices from the respective price list. However, for this project, we want to charge more for our Senior Designer's work. We click on Modify role prices and increase the selling price for this role.
     
   • Services and providers: Then, we add the services to the quote. The unit price will remain 0 at first; to populate the correct role-based selling price, we assign the necessary roles in the Cost and provider info column. Scoro automatically calculates the unit price and expected margin based on the role’s selling price and labor cost.
     
3. Tracking revenue and budget burndown.
   Once the client confirms the quote, we convert it into a project. Once people start working on the project, we can start using the Quoted vs Actual table to see how the role prices affect revenue calculation.
   • Real-time income: Our Junior Designer logs 50 hours (at 80 EUR/hr). The Income to date column in the QvsAl table shows that we’ve earned 50 x 80 = 4000 EUR so far.
     
     Then, our Senior Designer logs 30 hours (at 100 EUR/hr), adding 3000 EUR to the Income to date column total.
     
     As your project progresses, you can compare the income to date numbers (top value) with the initially quoted sums (bottom value).
   • Ad-hoc work: Any extra tasks added later (not in the original quote) will appear in the Not quoted section, still calculating revenue based on the doer’s role.
     
4. Time-billing:
   When it’s time to invoice your client for the project work, we simply select the completed time entries and create an invoice. Because we used role prices, the correct rates will be automatically populated on the invoice, with no manual adjustments needed.
   

5. Using roles for resource planning

Roles play a crucial part in resource planning. They act as the bridge between knowing what needs to be done and deciding who will do it. Depending on the size of your team and the complexity of your projects, Scoro offers two ways to plan resources using roles:

• Resource planning with bookings
• Task-level resource planning

5.1. Resource planning with bookings

The Bookings tool (Bookings module and the Bookings tab in the project detailed view) lets you create tentative bookings for role placeholders to indicate the specific resource or skill set needed for projects. You can transfer these bookings to actual users once you know which team members will carry out the required work.

When creating projects and tasks from a quote, Scoro automatically creates bookings for users and roles based on what was assigned for each quoted service or product. 

Learn more about using role placeholders in the Bookings module and Bookings tab in the project detailed view.

5.2. Task-level resource planning

If you prefer a more streamlined approach or don’t use the Bookings tool, you can do high-level resource planning directly at the task level by assigning roles to tasks – just as you would assign individual users. This lets you plan work and forecast costs even before the project team is assembled or the task is delegated to a specific user.

A site administrator needs to enable role assigning on your site before you can assign them to tasks:

1. Go to Settings > Work and projects > Calendar and tasks.
2. Enable the Assign roles to tasks checkbox.

Roles can be assigned to any tasks regardless of their type and how they were created, and you can assign multiple roles to a single task.

If your quote includes services with a role assigned – whether added directly on the quote line item or via the quote estimation matrix – Scoro automatically applies those roles as task assignees when creating tasks from a quote.

Role avatars have a dotted border, making them easy to identify and distinguish from user avatars.

When you’re ready to assign an actual team member to the task, click on the role avatar. Scoro will automatically suggest users who hold that specific role, making the handoff quick and intuitive.

Learn more about assigning roles when adding a task and replacing the assigned role with an actual user.

6. Exporting roles for making bulk changes

You can export the entire list of roles directly from the Roles settings page under Settings > Sales and finance > Roles to audit your pricing structure or update your roles in bulk.

By modifying the exported file and importing it back into Scoro, you can update selling prices and labor costs across multiple roles at once.

For step-by-step instructions and a breakdown of the export file structure, see our Exporting data article.

6. Frequently asked questions

Can a user have multiple roles?

No, each user can have only one role.

What happens when a user's role changes - for example, when they are promoted?

If you assign a user to a new role, all new time entries they create from that date forward will use the new role price. The historical time entries will remain unaffected to keep the historical revenue data accurate.

Can I delete a role?

Deleting a role is only possible when there are no active users assigned to that role.