DancebaseCreate Your Studio

Admin tiers & adding staff

4 min read

Not everyone who helps run your studio needs, or should have, the keys to everything. A front-desk volunteer reviewing team applications doesn't need access to your payment settings, and a part-time instructor covering a class doesn't need the ability to delete another admin. Dancebase has three real admin tiers, each one a genuinely different slice of the admin panel, not a cosmetic label slapped on identical access underneath.

Manage Admins page in the Dancebase admin panel, showing three tier description cards: Internal Staff, Admin, and Super Admin, each explaining exactly what that tier can and can't do
Settings → Manage Admins. The exact real tier descriptions your studio sees, word for word.

The three tiers, in detail

  • Super Admin. Full access to everything, plus the one genuinely unique power: the only tier that can add, remove, or re-tier other admins. There always has to be at least one active Super Admin on any studio, so the very last remaining one can't be demoted, deactivated, or deleted, on purpose, to prevent a studio ever accidentally locking itself out entirely.
  • Admin. Everything in the admin panel, Edit Mode, students, families, instructors, intensives, events, payments, custom form fields, broadcasts, all of it, with exactly one carve-out: can't manage other admins and can't touch studio-wide structural/pricing config. This is the right tier for a genuine co-manager or studio director who runs day-to-day operations alongside you.
  • Internal Staff. Marks attendance, edits class descriptions and instructor bios, and has full, unrestricted Team Management (applications and rosters), everything a team coach needs, without payments or site-wide settings. This tier absorbed the old separate Crew Lead role entirely, an existing Crew Lead admin is now just an Internal Staff admin with the same real team access as before.

What the admin list itself looks like

Once you've added a few people, your Manage Admins list shows every admin's email alongside their current tier, with a dropdown right there to change it and clear Deactivate/Delete actions per person.

Super Admin

Full access, plus adding, removing, and re-tiering other admins.

Admin

Everything in the admin panel: Edit Mode, students, families, instructors, intensives, events, payments, custom form fields, broadcasts.

Internal Staff

Mark attendance, edit class descriptions and instructor bios, and full Team Management. Can't change site content, structure, money, or other admins.

owner@example.com (you)Super Admin
studio.manager@example.com Admin
front.desk@example.com Internal Staff

Adding someone new

  1. 1
    Go to Settings → Manage Admins (Super Admin tier only, this page itself is gated).
  2. 2
    Tap + Add Admin.
  3. 3
    Enter their email address and choose the tier that actually matches what they'll be doing.
  4. 4
    They sign in exactly the same way you did, Google, no password, at /admin/login.
The New Admin form on Manage Admins, with an email field, a Tier dropdown defaulted to Internal Staff, and an Add button, with the note 'This just adds them to the allowlist. They can sign in with Google using that email right away, no invite email is sent.'
Adding someone is genuinely this simple: an email, a tier, done. No invite email goes out, they can just sign in the moment you add them.

Deactivate vs. delete, a real, meaningful difference

Deactivating an admin is fully reversible, it just quietly turns their access off without erasing anything, flip it back on anytime later. Deleting is genuinely not reversible, it's a real, permanent removal of that admin record entirely. When you're even slightly unsure which one you want, deactivate first, you can always delete later once you're certain.

See also

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Comping a payment vs. issuing a refund

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Managing instructor profiles