SparkyLive Has No Permission System, and That's the Point

Every other product in the Sparky suite has a permission model of some kind. SparkyProjects checks whether you're allowed to see a client's full board or just your own tasks. SparkyInvoices checks whether you're allowed to issue a credit note or only view one. SparkyContacts checks whether you can edit a deal stage or just read it. That's normal for tools built around teams — different people on the same team legitimately need different levels of access to the same organization's data.

SparkyLive doesn't have any of that. No roles, no permission checks, nothing to configure. And it's not because nobody's gotten around to building it — it's because the product doesn't need it, on purpose.

The only question SparkyLive ever asks

Open Home and you'll see up to three capture tiles: logging an expense, logging a contact interaction, and Memories. Whether the first two show up isn't decided by anything about your role, your seniority, or what you're allowed to do — it's decided by a single, much simpler question: does your organization have an active subscription to SparkyExpenses, and does it have one to SparkyContacts? If yes, the tile appears. If no, it doesn't. Memories, meanwhile, is always there, for everyone, regardless of what your organization subscribes to, because it isn't tied to any other product at all.

That's the entire gating logic. There's no separate "can this user actually use expenses" check layered on top of the subscription check, the way you'd find in most of the rest of the suite. If your org has SparkyExpenses, you personally can capture an expense through SparkyLive — full stop.

Why that's not a shortcut, it's the right model

It's worth being clear about why this isn't SparkyLive skipping a feature everyone else has. Permission systems exist to solve a specific problem: multiple people sharing access to the same organization's data need different levels of trust with it. A junior team member might be allowed to submit expenses but not approve them. A contractor might be allowed to see a project but not its billing details.

SparkyLive isn't solving that problem, because it isn't really a shared-data product in the same sense. It's a single-user capture tool that happens to ride alongside whatever organization you already belong to through another product login. There's no shared SparkyLive dataset that different members of your organization need graduated access to — your expense capture, your contact notes, and your memory books are yours. The organization context only matters for the one question of "does this org's subscription unlock this capture option," which is a yes/no toggle, not a role hierarchy.

Building a full role-based permission layer on top of that wouldn't add safety — it would just add screens nobody needs to look at. That's consistent with everything else about how SparkyLive is put together: Settings has exactly two things in it, your account name and a document storage connection, because there's no plan, billing, or team-role concept for a free, single-user-first app to manage in the first place. No Business page, no Members page, no Invitations-for-your-own-org page — SparkyLive genuinely doesn't have those concepts, not as a missing feature, but because the product was never meant to need them.

What this means day to day

Practically, it means using SparkyLive never involves waiting on someone to grant you access to something. If your organization has the underlying product subscription, you have the capture tile the moment you sign in — nobody has to configure a role for you first, because there's no role to configure. The complexity that exists everywhere else in the suite to manage who-can-do-what within a shared workspace just isn't a problem SparkyLive was built to solve, because it isn't a shared workspace.

That simplicity is easy to take for granted until you compare it against a product that does need the heavier machinery — at which point it becomes obvious how much of that machinery SparkyLive quietly gets to skip by being honest about what kind of tool it actually is.

How to do this in SparkyLive

You don't have to do anything to get this — it's just how Home decides what to show you the moment you sign in. If you want to see the full range of what's on offer, including SparkyLive's second life as a travel companion app once a trip invite comes in, the SparkyLive features page lays it all out.