Custom Roles: Rename Your Contact & Staff Roles

What is Custom Roles?

Every account works with the same ten roles. Three of them belong to your Contacts, Lead, Prospect and Client, and seven belong to your Staff: Super Admin, Admin, Project Manager, Office Manager, Teammate, Salesperson and Freelancer.

Custom Roles gathers all ten in one place on the Translations page, so you can give each role the word your business actually uses. A coaching practice can call its Clients Members. An agency can call its Freelancers Contractors. From the next page each person opens, your word is used everywhere the platform names that role: menus, lists, forms and notices, for Staff and Contacts alike.

You could already rename a role on the Translations page by hunting for its words among every other word in the account. Custom Roles gives that job a screen of its own, with every role, its fields and its default name side by side.

IMPORTANT: Renaming a role changes only what it is called. Nobody's role, access or permissions change, no roles are added or removed, and nobody has to log out and back in.

Who can rename roles?

Custom Roles is available on every plan, and it is reached by the same people who can already open the Translations page.

Super Admins and Admins can rename roles.
In a Child Account created by a SU1TE Partner, only the Super Admin can.
If your account has Hide Super Admin switched on, an Admin will not see the Super Admin role here and cannot rename it.
Project Managers, Office Managers, Teammates, Salespersons, Freelancers and all Contacts never see Custom Roles.

Where do I find it?

Custom Roles lives on the Translations page and nowhere else. Where exactly depends on how your account stores its wording.

If your account uses one wording (the usual setup), navigate to Flyout Menu > Translations, switch on Enable translation functionality, then click the Custom Roles icon in the rail on the right of the page. A Super Admin finds it under the Settings gear. An Admin, who has no gear, finds it under the globe.

If your account uses Multi-Language, there is a Custom Roles tab across the top of the Translations page instead, between Manage Email Templates and Settings.

CLICK HERE to learn about the Translations Toolkit

How do I rename my roles?

On an account with one wording, the Custom Roles icon opens a panel from the right with all ten roles in two sections, CONTACTS and STAFF.

Type your new words. Lead, Prospect and Client each have a Singular and a Plural field, because the platform names those three roles both ways. The seven Staff roles have one field each. Every field is required.
Rename as many roles as you like before you save. They are all kept together.
Click Save. The panel closes and the platform confirms Saved. The Translations editor behind the panel shows your new words straight away, with no reload.

TIP: The label above each box is always the platform's own word for that role, so you can still tell which role you are looking at long after you have renamed it.

Cancel, or closing the panel with the X, throws away anything you typed but did not save, without asking first.

What if my account uses Multi-Language?

Then each role is named separately in each language your account offers, on the Custom Roles tab. The tab is laid out like Manage Email Templates beside it.

On the left, the language you are editing, then the views All Roles, Contacts and Staff with a count each, and Reset All underneath.
In the middle, the roles of the view you picked. You can search for a role by any name it has in that language, including its default name, and sort by default order or by name.
On the right, the role you picked, with its Singular and, for Lead, Prospect and Client, its Plural. The default name sits in grey under each field.

Type the new name and click Save. The platform confirms, for example, Contractor saved in English., and the role is marked Renamed with its default name shown under it. Switch the language and set a different word there: each language keeps its own.

If you type a name and try to leave the role, change language or go back without saving, you are asked first, so a name is never lost by accident.

CLICK HERE to learn about Multi-language Support

How do I put a role back to its default name?

On an account with one wording, every role in the panel has its own Reset link, and Reset All sits at the end of the panel's footer. Both of them only put the default words back into the fields. Click Save to keep the change. A Reset link is greyed out while that role's fields already hold its default words.

On a Multi-Language account, a renamed role shows a Reset to Default button beside Save, which saves the default name straight away. Reset All, under the views on the left, puts every renamed role in the language you are looking at back to its default in one go, and asks you to confirm first. Your other languages are untouched.

What are the rules for a name?

A name cannot be blank.
A name can be at most 50 characters.
A name cannot contain curly or angle brackets, because the platform uses those for Placeholders such as {CLIENT}.
No two roles can share a name, as a singular or as a plural, whatever the letter case. A role also cannot take another role's default name. The field says Another role already uses this name.

A refusal appears under the field it belongs to, and nothing at all is saved until every refusal is fixed.

Where will my new names appear?

From the next page each person opens, everywhere the platform names that role, for your Staff and for your Contacts. You do not need to press Clear Cache: saving a name refreshes your account's wording itself.

In this version, a few places still use the platform's original words:

Anything sent by background work, such as scheduled emails, Automations and webhooks.
Anyone who has chosen to read the platform's original wording in their own profile.
Text that spells a role's word out rather than naming the role. You can change that text on the Translations page.
Searching or sorting a Quiz's list of people to assign by role, and the list of users shown when you assign a Portal Page as a Start Page.

TIP: A renamed role keeps your word when you load an official Language Set, so you will not lose it. A role you have reset goes back to following the Language Set.

Do my integrations still work after I rename a role?

Yes. When an integration creates a Contact, or a Company with its primary Contact, through the public API, the role name it sends is matched in this order:

your account's current name for the role,
the role's default name in your main language,
the role's original English name.

Letter case and surrounding spaces are ignored, so an integration built before you renamed anything keeps working. The only name refused is one that could mean more than one role. What the API sends back, and the list of role names it accepts, use your current names.

The Zapier app picks a role from a list and sends the role itself rather than its name, so a rename never affects it.
Contact imports from a file match a role by its number or by the platform's original name, not by your own name for it.

What happens if I turn Translations off?

On an account with one wording, switching Enable translation functionality off hides the rail, closes the Custom Roles panel and returns everyone to the platform's own wording, role names included. Your renames are kept and come back the moment you switch Translations on again.

What Custom Roles does not do

It does not add or delete roles, and it does not change what a role can see or do.
It does not give the Staff roles a plural. Only Lead, Prospect and Client have one.
It does not rename the A.I. Agent role or the External User role.

CLICK HERE to learn what each Staff role can do

CLICK HERE to learn about the Lead, Prospect and Client roles