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. Sees every team, squad, and engineer — unless Team Restrictions is on and the Owner has been given access to specific teams, locations or levels, in which case they only see those people (admin tools are unaffected).
Manager	Can view metrics for the people they’re given access to — everyone in a team, location or level. 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”.

People are managed from Admin > People, which has four tabs: Engineers, Teams, Locations and Levels. Old links to the separate Teams and Engineers tabs still work and open the matching People tab.

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 > People > Teams
2. Click Sync Github Team Data and choose Sync Team Data
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 (Sync Github Team Data > Unsync Team Data) if you want to manage them manually.

Creating teams manually

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

The Engineers without a team panel above the table lists engineers who aren’t in a team yet, so you can add them to a team in bulk. When Team Restrictions is enabled the table also shows a Managers column, and the team dialog has a Team Managers field — see Restricting access.

Locations and levels

Every engineer’s profile has a Location and a Job Level field. The Locations and Levels tabs under Admin > People manage these values as groups, the same way the Teams tab manages teams:

• Each tab lists every value Bilanc has seen for your organisation, with the onboarded engineers who hold it.
• Click New Location (or New Level) to create a value and add at least one engineer to it. Names are unique, ignoring case — if a value already exists, edit it instead.
• Edit a value to add or remove engineers. Adding an engineer moves them to this value; removing them clears the field on their profile.
• The Engineers without a location / Engineers without a level panel lets you assign everyone who is missing a value in bulk.
• When Team Restrictions is enabled, each row also shows its Managers, and the dialog has a Location Managers / Level Managers field. Anyone you add there is given access to every engineer with that value (see below). If you remove the last engineer from a value, its managers are removed too.

Locations and levels also drive the locations and levels filters in the dashboard and API, and can be used in onboarding rules.

Restricting access to specific teams, locations or levels

By default, anyone with the Manager role can see everyone. If you want a manager to only see part of the organisation, enable Team Restrictions and give them access to the people they should see — everyone in a team, a location or a level.

1. Enable Team Restrictions

   Go to Admin > Settings > Access Controls and switch on Enable Team Restrictions.

2. Give users access

   Once enabled, an access table appears below the switch. Click Add Access, select a user, and give them access by team, location or level. A user can have several entries and sees anyone matching any of them. You can also do this from the Managers column on the Teams, Locations and Levels tabs.

Once configured, that user only sees data for the people they were given access to — and any squads they create will be built from those people. While Team Restrictions is on, a Manager with no access entries sees nobody.

Owners are affected too. An Owner with no entries still sees the whole organisation, but an Owner who is given access to one or more teams, locations or levels only sees those people. Admin tools stay available to them either way.

Example: You have a senior director named Chen who runs Cloud Services. You assign him the Manager role and give him access to the “Cloud Services” team. Chen now only sees data for that team and can create squads from those engineers. If Chen also looks after everyone in the “Berlin” location, add a second entry for that location and he sees both groups.

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 they have access to
• 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)

Onboarding rules

From Admin → People → Engineers, you can onboard and offboard people by hand (Onboarding Actions), switch on Auto Onboarding Enabled, or click Onboarding Rules to decide automatically. Rules are re-evaluated on every pipeline run.

Each rule has:

Field	Options	Notes
Action	Onboard, Offboard	Onboard gives matching engineers a seat, up to the seat limit; Offboard reclaims it.
Condition	Activity metric, No activity condition	With an activity metric the rule applies to engineers whose activity crosses a threshold. Without one it applies to everyone matching the rule’s filters, so at least one filter is required.
Metric, Operator, Threshold, Date range	PR Count or Commits Count; Greater than or Less than; a number; last 7, 14, 30, 60, 90, 180 or 365 days	Only shown for an activity metric. The date range is a rolling window, re-evaluated on every run — not a fixed calendar range.
Filters for this rule	Any number of Exclude or Only filters on engineers, teams, locations or job levels	Narrows who the rule applies to, in addition to the metric and the filters for all rules. Click Add filter, pick a mode and a kind, then select values. Engineers and teams are picked from a list; for locations and job levels you can pick from the values Bilanc has seen or type your own, and matching is exact and case-insensitive.

Filters combine like this: every Exclude filter removes its matches first, then, if there are any Only filters, the remaining population is narrowed to engineers matching at least one of them. An engineer with no location or level never matches an Only filter on it. A rule can hold up to 100 team, location and level filters (engineer filters don’t count towards the cap).

Above the list of rules, Filters for all rules holds filters that apply to every rule of the organisation, with the same modes and kinds. Use it, for example, to exclude contractors or a bot account from every onboarding and offboarding decision without repeating the filter on each rule.

For example, Onboard with PR Count > 1 over the last 90 days (the default for a new rule) seats anyone who merged more than one pull request in the last 90 days, and Offboard with No activity condition and Only job levels: INTERN reclaims every intern’s seat.

Once at least one rule exists the Auto Onboarding Enabled switch is turned off and shows Managed by onboarding rules; delete the rules to use it again.

Access control settings

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

Setting	What it does
Disable Engineer-Level View	When enabled, hides individual engineer metrics from non-Owner users; they only see team-level metrics. Owners continue to see all engineer metrics.
Enable Team Restrictions	When enabled, users only see data for the people they are given access to (everyone in a team, location or level). When disabled, everyone sees all teams. See Restricting access.
Enable 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.
Currency	The currency used for salary and cost figures throughout the dashboard: USD, GBP, EUR or JPY.

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 > People > Teams, either manually or by syncing from GitHub. Fill in locations and levels on the Locations and Levels tabs if you want to use them for access or onboarding rules.

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 part of the organisation, enable Team Restrictions in Access Controls and give each manager access to their teams, locations or levels.

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.