FLOW LGX · PART 8 · MAY 2026
The first SaaS milestone, in May 2026, was access. Before anything else could become self-service, the platform had to know exactly who each user was, which company they belonged to, and what they were allowed to do.
Month by month, how a logistics platform for a Toronto client went from a simple brief to a live, multi-company SaaS product.
Distributors now run their own part of the platform as sub-admins and add admins and drivers as paid seats. The platform owner’s team gets limited roles such as compliance reviewer or support agent.
The heart of the SaaS model is the distributor. A distributor runs its own slice of the platform: its quote requests, jobs, inventory, storage, vehicles, billing and reports — and its own team. That makes the distributor a sub-admin: powerful inside its area, invisible outside it.
Distributors add people as seats. There are admin seats and driver seats, and each seat has a status — pending approval, active, or cancelled — with the dates it was created, activated and deactivated.
Every distributor has a profile page for the super admin: company name, contact details, its own domain, whether it takes part in the marketplace, its main user, and whether its subscription is active. From the same page the super admin can edit the distributor, suspend it, or use “View as user” to see the platform exactly as that distributor does — the quickest way to answer a support question without asking for screenshots.
A platform owner rarely works alone. The super admin can now add staff who are not full super admins, each with a focused job: compliance reviewer, vendor onboarding specialist, direct customer support agent, billing and subscription analyst, security audit analyst, and executive viewer.
A roles and permissions page lets the super admin decide which actions each of these staff roles can perform. The interface reads those permissions and shows only the buttons a person may use; the server enforces the same rules.
Each of the nine roles has its own home page and menu inside the shared layout. After sign-in the platform reads the role from the server, maps it to the right area, and sends the user straight there. The role list we kept in one file since January made this a contained change.
In SaaS, “who can see this?” is never answered by role alone. It is role, plus company, plus permission — design all three from the start.