What Your Field Staff See on ToolBerry Free - and Why It's the Bare Minimum
Give a helper the job, not the business. How roles shape what your crew sees on ToolBerry Free.
Give a helper the job, not the business. How roles shape what your crew sees on ToolBerry Free.
Published October 11, 2026.
Can I limit what my employees see in a free app?
Yes. On ToolBerry Free, each person you invite gets a role, and the built-in Staff role starts at the bare minimum: the jobs you assign them. Your helper gets a clean screen with today's work, and your customer list, invoices and costs stay out of their way.
You can change any role and preview it before you send the invite. There is one honest catch, and I'll come back to it: on Free, roles shape the app. They don't lock the data away.
Why start from the bare minimum?
Because a helper's phone should show today's job and nothing to get lost in. Less on the screen means less to learn, less to change by mistake and nothing to see that isn't theirs. You open things up when someone earns it, not the other way round.
Early in my career I worked with an owner who ran several businesses on big office software. Its permissions were so complicated that most people ended up as admins, just to get their work done. Everyone could see everything.
Field staff are hired for their trade and because you trust them, not for their app skills. So I set the default the other way: start small, and make the screen about the job.
What does that look like on a real Saturday?
Your helper opens the app and sees one job, ready to work, and none of the rest of your business. Here is how that goes for a one-truck landscaping business that needs a second pair of hands for a single Saturday cleanup, paid by the day.
Imagine a cleanup job comes in for Saturday: overgrown beds, two yards of mulch, a hedge. It's a two-person job. You call a guy you've worked with before and agree on a day rate, cash.
On Friday night you add him to your People list and give him the Staff role. You tap View as and look at the app the way he will. Then you send the link by text.
On Saturday he taps the link and sees the job you assigned: the address, the gate code in the notes, the checklist and the customer's name. He taps Start Work, ticks off the beds as he finishes them, snaps before and after photos and logs his hours, so you have a record when you pay him.
What he doesn't see: your other 60 customers, the quote you sent the neighbor or what you pay for mulch. He doesn't need any of it, and you don't have to wonder.
On Sunday you remove his access, and his phone deletes its copy the next time it's online.
What exactly does the Staff role see?
Staff see the jobs and visits assigned to them, plus the customer and site those jobs belong to. Everything else that could leak, confuse or get changed by accident starts hidden or locked. Here is the default, before you change anything:
| Staff can | Staff can't |
|---|---|
| See jobs and visits assigned to them | Browse your customers, contacts, sites or equipment |
| Open the customer and site on their job | See your invoices, quotes, rentals or agreements |
| Start and complete their work, and answer the checklist | See your costs, margins or anyone's pay rate |
| Log hours and expenses, add photos and comments | Create, reschedule or close jobs |
| Approve hours or expenses, or change your settings, price list and forms |
Owners and Admins see everything. ToolBerry won't create an invite until the person has a role, so nobody lands in your business with the keys to everything by accident.
Can I change what a role sees?
Yes, and it's free. You can rename a role, switch a whole section off for it, or hide just the list so staff can still open the customer on their own job without browsing everyone else. Depending on the size you picked at setup, ToolBerry also adds starter roles like Field Technician, which starts from the same baseline as Staff, and Coordinator.
Before you send a link, use View as to see the app through that role's eyes, or through one person's. A banner shows whose view you're in, and you can leave it anytime. In a shared workspace, only the owner's phone can do this.
Who should see what as you grow is a bigger question. I wrote about it in Who Can See What: Roles and Permissions for a Growing Service Business.
The honest tradeoffs
On Free, roles are a curtain, not a wall. Each phone keeps a full copy of your business, so the role decides what the app shows, not what's on the phone. Someone who digs under the app could reach the rest. ToolBerry says so on the screen where you turn sharing on.
- Invite people you'd trust with a paper work order. If a helper must never be able to reach your numbers, that is what ToolBerry Pro is for: a server checks every role and holds back what a role can't see. More in Free vs Pro: The ToolBerry Story, and What Each Plan Is For.
- Removing someone is best effort. Their phone deletes its copy the next time it's online. A phone that never comes back online keeps what it had.
- No team-wide record of who changed what. Comments show who wrote them, and each phone keeps its own Recent activity. The full Audit log is Pro.
What should I do next?
Open your People list, give your next helper the Staff role, and tap View as before you send the invite. If the screen shows anything you'd rather they not see, switch it off for that role. Then send the link.
Questions? Email contact@toolberry.net. ToolBerry is a free, offline-first field service management app for small service-trade businesses. Get it on the App Store or Google Play.
For the Technically Curious
- Where the hiding happens. In a shared workspace, every device keeps a full copy of the database. A teammate's phone applies its role when it reads: rows outside the role are filtered as the app loads them, and hidden fields are left off forms and tables.
- Why it can't be a wall. The check runs on hardware the teammate controls, against data already on that hardware. A shared Dropbox folder can't enforce rules on its own.
- What Pro does instead. The server withholds rows a role can't see, strips owner-only fields like unit cost and pay rates before they leave, and rejects writes a role isn't allowed to make.
Further reading
- Who Can See What: Roles and Permissions for a Growing Service Business
- Shared multi-user is here; your data, your Dropbox, your team
- Add an Employee With a Link - No Account, No Email, No Password
- How to Add Your Team to ToolBerry, Step by Step (Including Your Own Tablet)
- How to Keep Your Crew on the Same Page Without a Group Chat - What a Shared Workspace Shares
- Free vs Pro: The ToolBerry Story, and What Each Plan Is For