Users & access

Who can sign in, what each role can do, and how certifying and purchase-approval authority are granted.

RailCompliant keeps two separate ideas apart:

• The crew roster is everyone who works on the equipment. Labor, inspections, and crew assignments all attribute to roster people.
• An account is someone who can sign in. Accounts are unlimited and free — you are billed per locomotive, never per person.

Most of a railroad's roster never needs an account. Give one to the people who file inspections, sign them off, run work orders and runs, manage the shop, or run the subscription. Crew who have an account also get My Career, their own service record across every railroad they work with.

Granting an account

An administrator does this from the person's page under Crew. Fill in the App account panel:

• Login email — where the invitation goes.
• Role — General or Org admin.
• Grant certify authority — tick if this person signs off inspections.

Click Grant account & send invite.

If that email already has a RailCompliant login — a contract boiler inspector who works for several railroads, for example — the existing login is linked to your railroad and they are told they now have access; your railroad then appears in their railroad menu. If it does not, a new login is created and they receive a single-use link to choose their own password. That link is valid for 48 hours; if it expires, they can use Forgot your password? on the sign-in page.

If the person is already an active member of your railroad — an office manager who also fires, or the owner adding themselves to the crew roster — granting the account simply connects their existing login to this roster entry. Their role and certify authority stay as they were.

Roles

Every account is a General member or an Org admin at your railroad.

Org admins can do everything, always.

General members can do what your railroad lets them. What they can open (View) and add, edit, or remove (Change) is set area by area on the Roles & permissions matrix under Settings. Out of the box:

• On for general members: the compliance board, inspections and tests, annual records and filings (the 6180.49A, Form 4, Form 5, the audit binder), waivers, locomotives, rolling stock, fuel and service logs, work orders, parts, stores, vendors, requisitions, receiving stock, excursions and runs, and the Labor report.
• Off for general members: the crew roster, importing, exporting, form templates, the volunteer-hours report, and the Cost Center.

A few things are always administrators' and cannot be given to general members:

• Railroad settings and the permissions matrix itself.
• Billing — administrators can view it, and only the owner changes it.
• App accounts and roles.
• Binder share links for inspectors, and public restoration pages.
• Unlocking a completed work order.
• Correcting a stock count after a stocktake.
• Certifying the volunteer-hours report.

Everyone, whatever their role, has the dashboard, My Career, the Approval Inbox, notifications, the Calendar, the Regulations reader, and Support.

Certifying authority

Certifying authority is a permission of its own, deliberately separate from role. Doing the work and having the authority to sign for it are different things, and a general member can perfectly well hold sign-off authority while an administrator does not.

This is the permission the approval chain checks. When an inspection is submitted, only a person who holds certifying authority — through their account, not merely the roster marker — can be named as the certifying officer, and only that officer can approve or return it. See Approvals & signatures.

The same permission gates certifying a Form 4 boiler specification, freezing a 6180.49A annual record, and filling in Certified by or an Officer in Charge signature on an inspection form. A member without it still files inspections and signs their own inspector line.

Purchase-approval authority

Beside certify authority, an administrator can make someone a purchase approver: tick Approve purchases (requisitions) on their account and, optionally, set an Up to dollar limit on a requisition's estimated total (blank means no limit). Approvers decide requisitions within their limit but never their own; administrators can approve any requisition. See Requisitions & vendors.

Changing or removing access

From the same panel on a person's page an administrator can change an existing account's Role, its certifying authority, and its purchase-approval authority and limit, then click Update role & permissions. The person is notified when their role or certifying authority changes. Revoke access removes their access to your railroad; it does not remove them from the roster and it does not touch any work already attributed to them. The person keeps their login if they hold access at another railroad. A revoked account loses access on its very next click, even mid-session.

The owner is protected: their role cannot be set below Org admin and their access cannot be revoked at their own railroad. To change that, hand ownership to someone else first, on Billing.

Every grant, role change, and revocation is written to your railroad's permanent record history along with who made it.

People at more than one railroad

A person can hold access at more than one railroad with one login, which is how itinerant inspectors, welders, and consultants work. Each railroad grants access on its own terms — the same person can be a certifying officer at one and a general member at another.

When a login belongs to more than one railroad, the railroad's name at the top of the sidebar becomes a menu of Your railroads, each with the person's role there. Choosing one switches the whole app to that railroad. If one railroad's subscription lapses, its members can still switch to the others.

Related: Crew & qualifications for the roster itself, Settings & permissions for what general members can do, Billing for the owner account, and Audit binder for share links.