A common question is some version of: my colleague has a menu item I do not have, is something broken?
Usually nothing is broken. Three separate things decide what appears on your screen, and knowing which one is responsible turns a mystery into a thirty second fix.
One: which Apps the workspace has turned on
Apps are enabled per workspace. An App that is off is not dimmed and not locked. It is absent: no menu entry, no settings page, no empty screens.
This is why two companies using this platform can look like two different products, and it is the first thing to check because it is workspace wide and affects everybody equally.
How you know it is this: nobody in your workspace can see it, including the administrator.
Two: what your role allows
Within an enabled App, individual screens and actions are gated on permissions.
If a colleague can see something you cannot, and you are both in the same workspace, this is almost always the reason. Permissions are specific: viewing and editing are separate, raising and approving are separate.
How you know it is this: some people can see it and you cannot.
Three: your own scope
Some Apps narrow further than a permission. A manager may hold the permission to view people and still see only their own team. A regional figure may cover only their region.
Your numbers are correct for what you can see, and different from the same report run by somebody with a wider view. Nothing is wrong; you are looking at a different slice.
How you know it is this: you can open the screen, but the numbers look smaller than you expected. Reports that are scoped say so on the screen rather than leaving you to work it out from a total that looks low.
Working it out in under a minute
Ask three questions in this order.
- Can the administrator see it? If not, the App is off or the plan does not include it.
- Can any colleague see it? If yes, it is your role, and an administrator can compare the permission the screen needs against the role you hold.
- Can you see it but not all of it? It is your scope, and the screen will say what it is limited to.
Why it is built this way rather than the obvious way
The obvious alternative is to show everybody everything and refuse at the moment of use. Almost every older business system does this, and it produces two problems.
The first is a menu full of things you cannot do, which makes the product feel larger and more confusing than it is, and trains people to ignore whole sections.
The second is subtler and more important. A list of screens you cannot open still tells you what exists. On a platform holding pay data, client lists and hiring pipelines, the names of the screens are themselves information: which departments exist, what projects are running, that a recruitment process is under way. Hiding the control hides the fact as well.
One thing that is not any of the three
If a screen you have always been able to open suddenly refuses, check whether the workspace has reached a plan limit. A limit does not remove a screen, but it does refuse the specific action of adding more, and the refusal says so where it happens.