User Management

How to set up roles, teams, and squads in Bilanc

Bilanc uses a role-based system to control who can see what across your organisation. This guide explains the four roles, how teams and squads work, and how to get everything set up.

Roles

There are four roles in Bilanc, each with a different level of access.

Role	What they can do
Owner	Full access to all data, settings, and admin tools. Can see every team, squad, and engineer.
Manager	Can view metrics for the teams they’re assigned to. Can create their own squads from those people. Can assign squad leads.
Squad Lead	Can view metrics for the squads they’ve been assigned to lead.
Engineer	Can view their own individual metrics only.

When you invite someone to Bilanc, they’re assigned the Engineer role by default. You can change their role at any time from your identity provider settings.

Teams

Teams are the top-level grouping in Bilanc. They typically mirror your org chart — for example, “Cloud Services”, “Platform”, or “Mobile”.

Syncing teams from GitHub

If your GitHub organisation already has teams set up, you can sync them directly into Bilanc instead of creating them manually.

1. Go to Admin > Teams
2. Click Sync from GitHub
3. Preview the teams that will be imported
4. Confirm the sync

Synced teams will stay linked to GitHub. You can unsync them at any time if you want to manage them manually.

Creating teams manually

1. Go to Admin > Teams
2. Click Add Team
3. Give the team a name and optionally assign a department
4. Add members to the team

Restricting manager access to specific teams

By default, anyone with the Manager role can see all teams. If you want to restrict a manager so they only see their specific team, you can enable team restrictions.

1. Enable team restrictions

   Go to Admin > Settings > Access Controls and enable Team Restrictions.

2. Assign managers to teams

   Once enabled, a new section appears where you can map managers to teams. Select a manager and assign them to one or more teams.

Once configured, that manager will only see data for their assigned teams — and any squads they create will be built from those people.

Example: You have a senior director named Chen who runs Cloud Services. You assign him the Manager role and restrict his access to the “Cloud Services” team. Chen now only sees data for that team and can create squads from those engineers.

Squads

Squads are a way for managers to break down their teams into smaller, more focused groups. Unlike teams, squads are personal views — each manager creates their own squads from the people they have access to.

This is useful when a manager has a large team and wants to track subgroups separately, for example by project, workstream, or pod.

How squads work

• Only Owners and Managers can create squads
• A manager’s squads are built from the people in their assigned teams
• Owners can see all squads across the organisation
• Squads can be nested — you can create a hierarchy of squads within squads

Creating a squad

1. Go to Squads in the sidebar
2. Click Add Squad
3. Give the squad a name
4. Add members from your available engineers
5. Optionally assign a squad lead and a parent squad

Assigning a squad lead

When you assign someone as a squad lead, they automatically get visibility into the squads they lead. They don’t need any extra setup — they’ll see their squads and the associated metrics the next time they log in.

1. Open an existing squad or create a new one
2. In the Squad Lead field, select one or more people
3. Save the squad

Example: Chen creates a squad called “Cloud Infra” from his Cloud Services team and assigns Priya as the squad lead. Priya can now log in and see metrics for the Cloud Infra squad without Chen or an admin needing to do anything else.

Nested squads

Squads can be organised hierarchically. When creating or editing a squad, you can set a parent squad to nest it under another squad. This is helpful for modelling structures like:

Cloud Services (team)
├── Cloud Infra (squad)
│   ├── Networking (squad)
│   └── Storage (squad)
└── Cloud Platform (squad)

Access control settings

Owners can configure additional access controls from Admin > Settings > Access Controls.

Setting	What it does
Team Restrictions	When enabled, managers only see the teams they’re assigned to. When disabled, managers see all teams.
Show Salary Information	Controls whether salary and cost metrics (pull request cost, productivity cost) are visible. Only users with the salary permission can see this data.
Disable Engineer View	When enabled, hides individual engineer-level metrics from non-Owner users.

Putting it all together

Here’s a recommended setup flow for a new organisation:

1. Create or sync your teams

   Set up your teams in Admin > Teams, either manually or by syncing from GitHub.

2. Invite your managers

   Invite managers to Bilanc and assign them the Manager role from your identity provider.

3. Restrict access (optional)

   If you want managers to only see their own teams, enable Team Restrictions in Access Controls and assign each manager to their teams.

4. Let managers create squads

   Managers can now log in and create their own squads from the people they have access to. This is self-service — they don’t need an admin to do it for them.

5. Assign squad leads (optional)

   Managers can assign squad leads to give specific people visibility into their squads.

6. Invite engineers

   Invite engineers to give them access to their own individual metrics.

Need help?

Reach out to us at [e-mail] or visit the Bilanc dashboard.