Roles and credits
What your role lets you do, why a button you were told about might not be there, and what credits are spent on.
Why this page comes first
Two things decide what you see in Sparkia: your role and your organization's credits. Almost every question of the form "why can I not do this" comes down to one of them.
Read this once and the rest of the guide makes sense. Where a page describes something your role does not include, it says so.
The four roles
Everyone in an organization holds exactly one role. Whoever created the organization is its owner, and they choose the role for everyone they invite.
| Role | What it can do |
|---|---|
| Owner | Everything, including the plan and the organization's settings. Only an owner can change another owner's role or remove one. There is normally one. |
| Manager | Everything an owner can do day to day: invite and remove people, create and delete brands, change settings. A manager cannot act on an owner. |
| Editor | Runs the work. Edits brands, configures automations, runs them, cancels them, sees every run in the organization. Cannot invite people or change settings, and cannot create or delete a brand. |
| Member | Runs automations on the brands they are assigned to, and sees their own runs. Nothing else: no brand editing, no team, no settings. |
When a button is not there
Sparkia hides what your role cannot use rather than showing it greyed out. So a control described in this guide that you cannot find is not broken and not a bug: your role does not include it.
If you need it, ask an owner or a manager to either do the thing for you or change your role. Both take them seconds on the team page.
What credits are
A credit is one unit of automation work. Running an automation costs credits, and how many depends on the automation: a short caption costs less than a full content calendar. The cost is always shown before you commit, on the button and in the dialog.
Your organization gets an allowance each month. It is shared by everyone: it is not divided per person, so whoever runs the most uses the most. The meter at the foot of the navigation list shows what is left.
What spends credits
- Running an automation, whether you started it yourself, it ran on a schedule, or a reply automation answered someone.
- Generating an image or a video for a post, charged when you approve the prompt rather than when the text was written.
- Importing an AI chat history, priced on how much you selected before you commit.
What does not
- Reading, browsing, editing text by hand, scheduling, approving, replying yourself.
- A run that failed. The credits it reserved are returned automatically.
- A run you cancelled. Same: what it reserved comes back.
Per-person limits
An owner or manager can put a monthly credit cap on an individual person, usually a member. Once they hit it, their runs are refused until the next month, even though the organization still has credits left.
If your runs are being refused while the meter shows credits remaining, this is the likely reason. Ask whoever manages your team to raise or remove your cap.
One automation at a time
Each person can have one automation running at a time. Start a second and it waits its turn, then begins on its own the moment the first finishes. Nothing is lost and you do not need to come back to it.
Automations that answer comments and messages are exempt, because they run when someone writes to you rather than when you decide. So is anything you launch from a chat with Sparky.