Users are people who have access to the Yext platform. A user's record includes personal information, such as email address, username, and name, along with information about what they can access.
Access has two components:
- What a user can do, defined by their Role.
- What entities a user can do it with, defined by their Scope.
Each user can have multiple access controls, and each access control defines what the user can do in the account.
Roles
Almost every screen in the platform, and in many cases each button, sits behind a permission. Each role is made up of a set of permissions that correspond to those screens or actions, so you can customize a user's experience in Yext to a granular level.
Built-In Roles
Yext includes several roles out of the box, each combining permissions to fit a common persona. Some of the most popular built-in roles include:
- Account Manager: Access to add or update entities and manage listings, reviews, users, approvals, and account features. Doesn't include access to billing or service management. Best for regional managers or corporate users.
- Entity Manager: Access to manage entity-level content, listings, and reviews. Doesn't include access to billing, service, account settings, or user management. Best for a store manager, franchisee, or local user working with a specific entity or folder.
- Entity Viewer: View-only access to entity content, listings, reviews, and analytics. Can't make changes in the account or view account settings or user management. Best for a partner customer, store manager, franchisee, or local user.
- Content Requester: Access to request content changes and suggest review responses, though all requests go through approvals. Includes view access to listings, reviews, and analytics. Best for a franchisee or local user.
Built-in roles are updated with each release, so check the Create User screen in the platform for the most current set.
Custom Roles
If the built-in roles don't fit your brand's use case, define your own role by selecting each permission individually in the Custom Role interface.
You can create as many custom roles as you need, but we don't recommend creating a separate role for each user. Instead, think about the personas or user groups that need access to Yext, and build as few roles as possible to keep long-term management simpler.
Field-Level Permissions
Custom roles are especially useful for limiting access to specific fields in the platform. This works well if local users, such as franchisees or store managers, need to view or modify some content in Yext while the rest stays centrally controlled by corporate.
The Knowledge Graph supports permissions at the field level, not just the screen level. With custom roles, you can set each field's permission to:
- View the field
- Edit the field
- Edit the field, but only with approvals
- Add assets only to the field (select from pre-approved content only)
- No permission (the user doesn't see the field at all)
Scope
After you define what actions a user can take, decide where they can take them. Scope determines which entities a user's actions apply to.
Scope options are:
- Full Account
- Folder
- Entity
To give a user access to multiple folders or entities, add additional access controls with the role and folder or entity specified for each.
Account-Level Permissions
Some permissions only work at the account level. Even if a permission is included in a role, a user only has that permission if their scope is set to Full Account.
Custom field management is one example. If a user needs to manage custom fields but should only edit a specific folder of entities, create two access controls: one with the Manage Custom Fields role at Full Account scope, and one with the Edit Entities role at Folder scope.