What can each user role do in Tilt?

Quick answer

Tilt has four permission levels — Employee, Manager, Payroll, and HR. Every user starts as an Employee. Higher permissions unlock additional capabilities, from managing your own leave (Employee) to managing all leaves and settings at your company (HR). The table below shows what each role can do.

Who this applies to / Prerequisites

You want to understand what your role can (or can't) do in Tilt.
You want to plan permissions for someone at your company.

Key concepts

All users on the Tilt platform are considered Employees. Every user has Employee access at minimum.
Manager access is granted contextually. A user becomes a Manager when they're listed as the manager for an employee who is taking a leave. This gives them insight into information associated with their direct report's leave.
Payroll and HR are higher-level permissions. These give a user access to company-wide settings, payroll data, and leave management for other employees. They're granted deliberately by an HR Admin.
Contractor is an additional role. It can be added on top of any user type. Contractors have the same access as the base user type, with one limitation: Contractors cannot initiate a leave of absence. See the Contractor section below for more.

Permissions matrix

Feature / Capability	Employee	Manager	Payroll	HR	IT
Access to Tilt Help Center	X	X	X	X	X
Access Contact Us form and access to Tilt Leave Success Team for support	X	X	X	X	X
Request a leave of absence ¹	X	X	X	X	X
View your leave plan (Leave Steps, Leave Calendar, Benefits, Pay Calculations)	X	X	X	X	X
Upload, manage, and view documents associated with your leave plan	X	X	X	X	X
Update your leave request form	X	X	X	X	X
View Tilt To-Do Items in another user's leave plan		X		X
View and manage the Leave Calendar in another user's leave		X		X
View the Benefits in another user's leave plan		X		X
View another user's Pay Calculation			X	X
Export Payroll data from the Company Payroll page			X	X
View and manage Company Profile settings			X (Pay Periods only)	X
View and upload Documents to another user's leave plan		²		X
Invite new users and upload user data to Tilt				X
View leave data across all users			X	X
Export leave data across all users				X
Initiate a leave for another user				X
Approve or deny a user's leave request				X
Invite new users and upload user data to Tilt				X	X
Configure SFTP				X	X
Configure user ingestion / import mapping				X	X
Configure & manage integrations				X	X
Company uploads				X	X
Org-wide policy configuration				X
HR Dashboard / leave reporting			X (leave overview data only)	X

¹ Contractors (overlay role) cannot initiate a leave of absence. ² Managers see these only for employees they manage who have an active leave plan, and Manager capabilities are governed by your company's Manager permission configuration. Some capabilities (e.g., changing leave dates, uploading/downloading documents, Leave Type visibility) are off by default and can be turned on company-wide.

Note about Payroll and HR access

The Payroll and HR columns in the matrix above show the capabilities available to users with those permissions. But within each, there are two variants that affect how much of the company they can see:

Payroll Admin / HR Admin — full company-wide access to the capabilities in the matrix.
Payroll User / HR User — the same capabilities, but scoped to the specific cohorts they're assigned to. They see only the employees and data within their assigned cohorts.
HR User: View Only — a read-only version of HR User. Scoped to cohorts the same way as an HR User, but with no ability to edit leave plans, manage documents, add/remove benefits, or be assigned to a leave. Useful for stakeholders (such as HR Business Partners) who need visibility without administrative access.

For the full breakdown of Admin vs. User access, see What's the difference between HR Admin, HR User, HR User: View Only, Payroll Admin, and Payroll User in Tilt?

Contractor role

The Contractor role is an overlay that can be added to any user type. Contractors have the same access as the base user type (for example, an Employee Contractor has Employee access), with one important limitation:

Contractors cannot initiate a leave of absence in Tilt.

Contractors also have specific behaviors with our integrations:

Rippling integration: Rippling imports contractor user data and then immediately deactivates the contract users in Tilt.
Workday integration: Workday does not ingest contractor user data at all.

What if it doesn't work

If you're not sure what your role is, ask an HR Admin at your company to check your permissions.
If you can see something in Tilt that isn't listed for your role, or can't do something that is listed, refresh your browser and log out and back in. If the issue persists, contact your HR team.
Managers, Payroll, and HR access don't stack automatically. If you need multiple permissions, an HR Admin has to grant each one deliberately.

Limits and exceptions

Cohort-scoped HR Users and Payroll Users see only their assigned cohorts. Cohort scoping doesn't apply to Managers, Employees, or Admins. See the note above and the What's the difference between HR Admin, HR User, HR User: View Only, Payroll Admin, and Payroll User in Tilt? article for detail.
Manager permissions are automatic — if someone is listed as an employee's manager in Tilt, they get Manager access for that employee's leave only. No manual assignment needed.
Payroll users' access to Company Profile settings is limited to Pay Periods only.
Contractor is an overlay, not a replacement. A Contractor still has whatever base role (Employee, Manager, etc.) they were assigned.