Changes to leafplanner Family Account Roles & Permissions

Last updated · September 2026

leafplanner is expanding the family account role structure to give account owners and administrators more precise control over what each user can and cannot do within a family account. This update introduces three new roles — Owner, Manager, and Contributor — and refines the permission granularity for the existing Advisor and Viewer roles. The goal is to better reflect real-world access needs across diverse family account configurations, including those provisioned through enterprise accounts.

Role overview

What's new

Owner (new)

Owner is a new top-level role and the true account owner for a family account. It is the only role with exclusive control over account billing and payment info, adding related accounts, and legacy contact management. Where a family account has been provisioned by an enterprise client, the default owner is set to the enterprise admin and/or assigned enterprise advisor. Owner has full, unrestricted access across all areas of the account.

Manager (new)

Manager is a new mid-tier role designed for trusted family members or delegates who need broad access but should not hold full administrative authority. Manager permissions are configurable — some default on (such as creating and editing most content and sharing documents), while others default off or are always restricted (such as editing account settings). Administrators can fine-tune what each Manager user can and cannot do.

Contributor (new)

Contributor is a new role designed for family members or staff who need more granular access than a Viewer but don't hold an advisory relationship. It mirrors the Advisor permission set exactly — including the same configurable defaults — but uses a family-friendly name more appropriate for non-advisor participants such as household staff, personal assistants, or involved family members. Like Advisor, most Contributor permissions default to off and must be explicitly enabled by an Owner or Admin.

What's refined

Advisor

Advisor has been updated with more granular permission toggles. Advisors now have a wider range of configurable permissions — most of which default to off — giving account owners the ability to selectively enable capabilities like document uploads, contact edits, or calendar sync on a per-advisor basis. Advisor retains the ability to create and edit resources and view related content they have been tagged in.

Viewer

Viewer remains a read-only role. The refinement here is in how its access is described: where Viewers can see pages or content (such as alerts or tasks), this access is now explicitly marked as conditional — meaning they only see items they have been specifically tagged or shared on, not the full account record.

What stays the same

Admin is unchanged. It retains full access to all family account content and settings, can provision roles, and manages all areas of the account short of billing controls (which are now exclusively Owner). All six roles can dismiss and mark notifications as read, and all roles can edit their own user profile.

Permissions reference

Key things to note

• The configurable permission model for Manager, Contributor, and Advisor means two users with the same role can have meaningfully different access depending on how their permissions have been set by the account's Owner or Admin.
• Contributor and Advisor share identical permission sets. The distinction is in name and intended audience: Contributor is designed for family members or staff, while Advisor is intended for professional advisory relationships.
• Billing controls — coming soon.
• Share tags — the ability to create, assign, and delete the tags that control what Advisors, Contributors, and Viewers can see — remain restricted to Owner and Admin only. Note that share tag functionality is a custom add-on and may not be available in all accounts.
• For enterprise-provisioned family accounts, the default Owner is set to the enterprise admin and/or the assigned enterprise advisor.