Adding Staff and Assigning Roles

To add a new staff member, navigate to the Staff section in the sidebar and click the Add Staff button. The staff creation form collects essential information in several categories: personal details, employment information, credentials, and platform access.

In the personal details section, enter the staff member's full legal name, email address, phone number, and emergency contact information. The email address is particularly important because it serves as the staff member's login credential and is used for all platform communications including schedule updates, notification emails, and password resets.

The employment information section captures the staff member's hire date, employment type (full-time, part-time, or contractor), assigned location or locations, and their supervisor. For clinical staff, you will also set their service area or caseload region if your practice uses geographic assignments. The hire date is used in HR reporting and can trigger automated onboarding tasks if your organization has configured them.

Once you save the staff record, PracticeABA sends an automated invitation email to the new staff member with instructions to set their password and complete their profile. They will be guided through a brief onboarding checklist the first time they log in.

PracticeABA uses a role-based access control system where each staff member is assigned one or more roles that determine what they can see and do in the platform. The built-in roles are designed to match common positions in an ABA practice.

The Owner role has full unrestricted access to every feature and setting in the platform, including billing data, financial reports, and organization settings. This role should only be assigned to practice owners or executive leadership. The Admin role has broad access to manage staff, clients, scheduling, and billing, but cannot modify certain organization-level settings reserved for owners.

The BCBA role is designed for Board Certified Behavior Analysts and includes access to treatment planning, goal management, data analysis, supervision logging, and session note review. BCBAs can see all clients on their caseload and can be granted access to view other BCBAs' clients for collaboration purposes. The RBT role provides access to the daily schedule, session documentation, data collection, and messaging features. RBTs can only see clients they are assigned to work with.

The Biller role grants access to the billing module, including claims management, authorization tracking, payment posting, and financial reports. Billers can view client insurance information and session notes needed for claims but do not have access to clinical treatment plan details. Additional roles such as Clinical Director and Office Manager can be configured with custom permission sets if the built-in roles do not match your organizational structure.

When you create a staff record, you select their primary role from the role dropdown menu. This immediately applies the default permission set for that role. You can further customize individual permissions if needed by toggling specific access rights on or off within the staff member's profile.

Some staff members may need multiple roles. For example, a BCBA who also handles some administrative tasks might be assigned both the BCBA and Admin roles. When multiple roles are assigned, the staff member receives the combined permissions of all assigned roles, with the most permissive setting taking priority for any overlapping permissions.

It is important to assign roles thoughtfully and follow the principle of least privilege, giving each staff member only the access they need to perform their job. This protects client privacy, reduces the risk of accidental data modification, and helps your practice maintain HIPAA compliance. You can review and adjust role assignments at any time from the staff member's profile page.

PracticeABA also logs all permission changes in an audit trail, so you have a record of who had access to what and when any changes were made. This audit trail is available to Owners and Admins under the Settings section and can be useful during compliance audits or incident investigations.

Every clinical staff member in an ABA practice must maintain current credentials, and PracticeABA helps you track them all in one place. In the Credentials tab of each staff member's profile, you can record their certification type (such as BCBA, BCaBA, or RBT), certification number, issuing body, issue date, and expiration date.

The platform supports tracking multiple credentials per staff member. In addition to their BACB certification, you might track state licensure, CPR certification, background check clearance, liability insurance, and any other credentials required by your state or insurance payers. Each credential entry includes a document upload field where you can attach a scanned copy of the certificate or license for easy reference.

PracticeABA automatically monitors credential expiration dates and sends alerts at configurable intervals before a credential expires. The default alert schedule sends notifications at 90 days, 60 days, 30 days, and 7 days before expiration. When a credential expires, the system can optionally restrict the staff member from being scheduled for sessions, preventing compliance violations.

The Credentials Dashboard, accessible from the Staff section, provides a consolidated view of all staff credentials across your organization. You can quickly see which credentials are current, expiring soon, or already expired, and you can export this information for compliance reporting or insurance credentialing applications.