Multi-tenant RBAC in Practice

Role-based access control (RBAC) has to scale across tenants, brands, and locations—without creating a policy maze.

Scoping model

• Tenant scope: The organization (brand or company).
• Location scope: One or more stores within a tenant.
• Resource scope: Specific domains (sales, inventory, labor, finance).

Roles and permissions

• Global Admin: Manage tenants, billing, and compliance.
• Ops Manager: Multi-location oversight; approve reconciliations and anomalies.
• Location Manager: Day-to-day tasks, corrections, staff updates.
• Analyst: Read-only with export privileges.

Evaluation strategy

• Early deny for missing tenant or location membership.
• Policy evaluation per resource action with clear reasons (for audit).
• Decision logs including who, what, where, when, and why.

UX considerations

• Surface why an action is disabled and who can grant it.
• Provide a request-access workflow with approvers and SLAs.
• Keep the nav contextual to the current location to reduce errors.

Performance and safety

• Cache role grants per session with scoped invalidation.
• Enforce row-level filters in queries for tenant/location.
• Run a permission matrix test suite in CI for critical paths.

This approach keeps access safe, auditable, and understandable as the operation grows.