Roles: Owner, Admin, Member, Viewer

Scout has exactly four roles, and every person in a workspace holds one of them. Roles decide what you can do. They are not a content setting — a role by itself never makes anyone a universal reader of other people's mail.

The People and roles section listing each person with their role, above four cards describing what each role can do.

Screenshot: Settings → Workspace → People & roles. The four role cards at the bottom of that page say the same thing this article does, in one line each.

The four roles in one line each

Owner — full access and visibility. One per workspace.
Admin — full access and visibility except billing.
Member — access, visibility, and management of work assigned to them or their teams.
Viewer — read-only access and visibility of work assigned to them or their teams.

What each role can do

	Owner	Admin	Member	Viewer
See work assigned to them or their teams	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Use the All scope (everything workspace-visible)	Yes	Yes	No	No
Claim and return team work	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Handle or dismiss an item	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Follow an item, hide it for themselves	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Rate a point Useful, Not useful, or Wrong	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Assign work inside their own teams	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Assign work across teams, and assign in bulk	Yes	Yes	No	No
Settle an identity match	Yes	Yes	Their own or their teams'	No
Review personal-mail visibility	Yes	Yes	No	No
Mute an item for everyone, and reopen a muted item	Yes	Yes	No	No
Invite people, change roles, deactivate and reactivate	Yes	Yes	No	No
Create and manage teams, and set the fallback team	Yes	Yes	No	No
Change workspace settings, including the Inbox window	Yes	Yes	Read-only	Read-only
Enable, disable, and tune Watches	Yes	Yes	Read-only	Read-only
Connect, pause, reconnect, revoke, and retire sources	Yes	Yes	No	No
Be the owner of a personal mailbox Scout reads	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Manage their own profile and notification preferences	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Confirm or revoke their own Slack link	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Manage the plan and billing	Yes	No	No	No
Transfer ownership of the workspace	Yes	No	No	No

Notes that matter in practice

A Viewer is not a reduced Member in what they see. Scout works out a Viewer's visible work exactly as it would for a Member in the same teams. The difference is that nothing is clickable: no claiming, no handling, no rating. The one thing a Viewer does control is their own brief and notification delivery.
Admins cannot see billing. The plan, the card, and the invoices belong to the Owner.
The Owner cannot be deactivated. To remove the current Owner from a workspace, transfer ownership first. See Transferring ownership.
An Admin's reach is wide but not unlimited. An Admin can approve sharing work that came out of a colleague's personal mailbox, but that approval shares Scout's conclusion and the minimum excerpt needed to act — never the message body or the attachment. No role in Scout grants blanket access to another person's mail.
Connecting a source is an Owner or Admin action today, including a personal mailbox. The mailbox still belongs to the person whose mail it is: they remain its source owner, and what Scout reads from it starts private to them.
There are no custom roles, no nested groups, and no team-lead permission. If you need someone to configure Scout, make them an Admin; if you need them to do the work, Member is right.

Choosing a role when you invite someone

Pick Member for anyone who will work items — reps, coordinators, purchasers. This is the right answer most of the time.
Pick Admin for the one or two people who will configure Scout: connections, teams, Watches, and the visibility queue.
Pick Viewer for someone who needs the picture but not the keyboard — an outside bookkeeper, a partner, an advisor.
Leave Owner where it is unless the accountable person is changing.

Good to know

Roles can be changed at any time from Settings → Workspace → People & roles, and take effect immediately.
A Viewer still counts as a second seat. A workspace that adds a Viewer stops being a solo workspace, so the scope controls appear and items are no longer claimed for you automatically.
Scout checks your role on the server every time you act, not in the browser. A control you should not have is not merely hidden — the action itself is refused.
Every change of role, every assignment, and every closure is recorded with who did it and when.