Divisions and local permissions

Divisions are the backbone of everything Cobber does with permissions. Get them right and distributed organising works; get them wrong and either nobody can see anything, or everybody can see everything.

The hierarchy

What each level reaches

Level	Sees
National	Everyone in the organisation.
State	That state, and every local group under it.
Local group	People in that group's electorates, and nobody else.

How a person ends up in a local group

Local groups cover electorates. Cobber works out a person’s federal electorate, state electorate and LGA from their address, and that places them.

You don’t maintain a mapping by hand, and you don’t have to sort people into local groups yourself. It’s also why an import without addresses leaves people invisible to admins at local level — see importing a spreadsheet.

For the cases where the electorate isn’t the right answer — someone who organises in the local group next door, say — there’s a manual override on the person.

It’s enforced on the query, not the screen

This is worth understanding, because it changes what you can safely delegate.

Scoping is applied when the data is fetched, not by hiding things in the interface. A local admin building a campaign, running an export or searching people is working from a set that never contained anyone else’s records in the first place. There’s no URL to guess and no filter to remove.

That’s what makes it reasonable to give a volunteer local organiser a login.

Money follows the same rule

Finance access is granted the same way as everything else: by the division a role sits at. A role carrying Finances read at Western Australia gives that admin the Finances tab for Western Australia — the overview totals, Transactions, Subscriptions, the disclosure watch and the revenue figures on the dashboard home, all covering that state and nothing else. A pill at the top of Finances names the divisions the figures on screen cover, so a state total is never mistaken for the organisation’s.

Like people visibility, this is the union across every role someone holds — not just their finance role. Give your WA treasurer a second role at national level for anything else, and their finance reach widens to national too. If someone is seeing more money than expected, check every role they hold, not just the one you think of as “their finance role.”

Two things worth expecting:

• The fundraising target is organisation-wide. It’s one number for the whole organisation, set by a national finance role. A state or local admin’s Finances Overview doesn’t show a target, a progress bar, or an editor for it at all — there’s nothing to show them, because it isn’t a figure their own view is measured against.
• A couple’s membership counts for both. If one person on a joint membership is in your division, that membership is in your figures — even if the other person on it isn’t.

Common mistakes

Fault finding

Symptom	Cause and fix
An organiser sees nobody	Their role is at a local group with no people placed in it yet — usually because addresses are missing.
Two people get different counts from the same filters	Working as intended. Their roles sit at different divisions.
A member turns up in the wrong local group	Their address puts them in that electorate. Use the manual override if the address is right but the local group isn't.
A treasurer sees the whole country's money	Check every role they hold, not just the finance one — a second role at national level for anything else widens their reach the same way it would for people visibility.
A treasurer sees no money at all	None of their roles carries Finances read, or the role that does sits at a division with nobody placed in it.
Head office wants a local group's numbers	Anyone at state or national level already sees them — no need to ask the local group to export anything.