Role-Based Accounts vs. Individual Accounts

1. What Each Is

Individual Account: One login per employee. The account is created with their personal email address (or a unique identifier). When they submit a checklist, the submission shows their name. When they complete a task, the record is attributed to them personally. If they leave, the account can be deactivated — and their submissions remain on record under their name.

Role-Based Account: One login per role per location. The account email is a positional address like storemanager.store5@company.com — not tied to any individual person. When staff turns over, the new person in that role logs in with the same credentials. No account change in Xenia required. Submissions show "Store 5 — Store Manager Account" or similar — not an individual's name. 

2. When to Use Each

Use Individual Accounts for:

• Management and supervisory roles where individual accountability matters
• HR-related forms where who signed off is legally important
• District Managers, Area Managers, compliance officers — people with unique responsibilities
• Any role where "who specifically did this" is more important than "which position did this"
• Roles with low turnover

Use Role-Based Accounts for:

• Frontline positions with high turnover (cashiers, cooks, store associates)
• Shared tablet situations — one tablet in a store, no personal device
• Locations where requiring individual accounts for every frontline employee would be impractical
• Situations where "the store completed this" is sufficient — you don't need to know which specific employee 

3. The Hybrid Approach (Most Common)

Most multi-location operations use both:

• Store tablets: Role-based accounts for frontline submissions
• Manager devices: Individual accounts for supervisory roles, audits, and HR forms

This balances practical ease (no individual account management for high-turnover positions) with accountability (managers are personally identified on their submissions). 

4. Key Limitations of Role-Based Accounts

Individual task assignment doesn't work: You can't assign a task to a specific named person if they don't have their own account. Role-based assignment is the correct approach when using shared accounts.

Submission attribution is positional, not personal: If you need to know "which specific employee" completed a form, a role-based account can't tell you — unless you add a Text Field step asking the employee to enter their name.

Password management at turnover: When staff changes, reset the password for the role-based account. Whoever is in that position next uses the new password. This is the maintenance burden — simpler than creating/deleting user accounts, but requires a process. 

5. Workaround for Individual Identification on Shared Accounts