Roles and Access
The three access tiers in SeaSquad, what each can do, and how vessel scoping keeps users limited to their assigned fleet.
Overview
SeaSquad controls access with two independent things: a role, which determines what a user is allowed to do, and a vessel scope, which determines which vessels they can do it on. Understanding both is the key to understanding who can see what.
The three role tiers
Platform administrators
Platform administrators operate SeaSquad itself. They have unrestricted access across every company and vessel on the platform, including platform-level configuration such as roles and company setup. This tier is intended for your SeaSquad platform operators, not for day-to-day fleet staff.
Company administrators
Company administrators are your organization's super-admins. They have full operational access — vessels, certificates, inspections, defects, reports, procurement, documents, email, users, and QHSE — but only for the vessels assigned to them, and they cannot touch platform-level configuration (roles or company setup), which stays with platform administrators. In other words, a company administrator is powerful within their scope, but that scope is still bounded by vessel assignment, not automatically fleet-wide.
Fleet users
Fleet users are the standard operational role for shore staff and vessel accounts — superintendents, department leads, and vessel logins. They cover the day-to-day work: reading and updating equipment and certificates, running inspections, logging and managing defects, working with reports and requisitions, managing documents, and reading email context — all scoped to their assigned vessels. Fleet users don't get administrative or platform configuration access.
A user's day-to-day behavior on the platform (for example, whether their account represents a shore office role or a specific vessel) is a separate setting from their role tier. The role tier governs what they can do; that setting governs how their account is used.
Vessel scoping
Every non-platform user is bound to a specific set of vessels. That set is the union of:
- Vessels explicitly assigned to the user
- Vessels the user is set as the manager of
- Vessels where the user holds a report assignment
Only platform administrators see across the entire fleet by default. Everyone else — including company administrators — only sees and acts on the vessels in their scope. This applies consistently across the platform: inspections, reports, PSC/RCA data, fleet status views, and the AI assistant all filter to a user's vessel scope automatically. If a user tries to access a vessel outside their scope, the request is denied.
This means the same role can look different in practice for two different users — a company administrator scoped to five vessels sees a different working set than one scoped to fifty, even though their permissions are identical.
Where SeaSquad shows fleet-wide statistics to a scoped user — for example, recurrence trends in PSC/RCA — vessels outside their scope are still counted but shown only as an anonymous total, never by name.
Managing users and roles
Administrators manage user accounts, role assignments, and vessel scope from the administration area of the platform. From there, an administrator can invite or deactivate users, assign or change a user's role tier, and set or update which vessels a user is scoped to. Changes to vessel assignment take effect immediately across every feature that depends on scope — inspections, reports, PSC/RCA, and the AI assistant included.
If your organization needs a different mix of permissions than the three standard tiers provide, talk to your administrator — role definitions themselves are managed at the platform level.