Guide
In this guide, we’ll walk through how to set up a simple but powerful access model - one that reflects real-world organizational needs.
Let’s say you have two databases: Employee and Salary. Each employee has a salary, and employees can also report to other employees - creating a clear reporting structure.
✅ Use Cases this covers:
An employee can view their own salary, but not others'.
A manager can view their own salary and the salaries of their direct (or indirect) reports.
HR or admin roles can still have full access as needed.
By combining relations with Fibery’s granular permissions, you can mirror your team’s structure while keeping sensitive data like salaries properly scoped.
Let’s dive into how to set this up!
Databases setup:
If not yet, set self-relation on the Employee database level, and let's call two fields that appeared: Reports to and Subordinates
Employee may also have multiple Salaries.
An Employee has a one-to-many relation with Salaries to account for changes over time. This allows you to track salary history - for example, when someone gets a raise or promotion. Instead of overwriting the old value, each new salary is stored as a separate record, linked to the same employee. This way, you can maintain a full audit trail and analyze compensation changes over time.
Creating Access template
Here you can read what are access templates - Custom Access Templates for Sharing Entities
Please, note, that this functionality works on Pro and Enterprise plans only.
Here is how our template looks like:
How it works – level by level
Root: Employee (Self)
Level 1: Subordinates
Level 2: Salaries of Subordinates
Level 3: Subordinates of Subordinates
Level 4: Salaries of Subordinates of Subordinates
Bottom Level: Salaries (Self)
Permissions indicators
Each level shows different types of access:
This means users:
Can view and comment on salary and employee records they’re permitted to access
Cannot edit or delete them
Cannot share them publicly
You are very welcome to configure access for every database on your own
Apply the template
Now we can use the template. Template can be applied not to the Employee, but to Fibery User.
While the access model is built around the Employee database, permissions are granted to actual Fibery Users - the people using the tool. This is important because not every Employee record needs to represent an active user (e.g., past employees, placeholders, or external roles). By applying the template to Fibery Users, you ensure that each person only sees data related to themselves and their reporting tree. Behind the scenes, this works by linking each Fibery User to the corresponding Employee record - and from there, permissions flow naturally through the hierarchy.
We will use People field for this purpose. You will need to create a People field on the Employee database (don't allow multiple people), turn on Automatically share Employees switcher and choose the Template from the dropdown.
What this configuration enables
Employees: See and comment on their own profile and salary.
Managers: See their subordinates' profiles and salary history — even for multi-level team structures.
Hierarchy-aware access: Visibility scales automatically as the org chart grows deeper.
What’s next: ideas & extensions
This kind of hierarchical permission setup isn’t just for salaries - it opens the door to all kinds of smart access control in your workspace. Here are a few ways you can build on this model:
Managers can access their team's reviews, provide feedback, and track growth - while keeping reviews private from peers or other departments.
Let employees track their own objectives, and enable managers to see aggregated progress for their teams - across nested reporting chains.
Give employees visibility into their own submissions, while allowing team leads to review and comment on their team's expense activity.