The studio owner guide

You are the owner. That means every permission in the product, plus a short list of things nobody else at your studio can do — including your admins. This guide walks the setup in the order it actually works: get the studio created, dress it up, bring in staff, build the timetable, then connect Stripe.

What this role can do

You can

Everything an admin can do — all 18 permissions in the product are yours by default.
Manage staff: invite people, create accounts for them, change roles, and deactivate or restore access.
Hand any non-owner a custom access set that overrides their role, module by module.
Set up Stripe Connect and take card payments. This is owner-only; an admin cannot start, resume, or re-check it.
Delete the studio, from the Danger Zone in Studio Settings.
Approve or reject your own timesheet — everyone else is blocked from reviewing their own.
Assign the Admin role. It does not appear in the role picker for anyone else.
Review the hours your staff submit — approve them, or send them back with a reason.
Decide when a family asks to pause their membership, and cancel a pause you scheduled.
Publish events with a public page, a QR code and a printable poster, and charge for them through your own Stripe account.
Answer the questions your public page collects, from one inbox.

You cannot

Make a second owner. The invite and role forms offer only Admin, Instructor and Front Desk — there is no tenant-side path to grant the owner role. Ask Catomni support.
Step down, hand over, or remove yourself while you are the only active owner. Both demoting and deactivating the last owner are refused with "Cannot remove the last owner."
Restrict an owner. The access editor refuses with "An owner’s permissions cannot be restricted."
Edit your own permissions — "You cannot change your own permissions."
Undo a studio deletion from inside the app.
Edit an instructor’s logged hours. Entries belong to the person whose sheet it is, and only change while that sheet is a draft or has been returned. Reject it with a reason instead.
Undo an approval, unpublish a class report, or reopen a cancelled event. All three are one-way doors.
Refund an event ticket inside Catomni. The money went to your own Stripe account, so the refund happens there.
Grant someone the right to write session reports. Authorship follows the owner, admin and instructor roles and has no row in the access editor.

In this guide

Create your studio

Any signed-in account can create a studio, and whoever creates it becomes its owner.

Settings, branding and your public page

Studio Settings is a seven-tab page: General, Classrooms, Classes, Branding, Landing Page, Payments and Emails. It needs the Manage studio settings permission — owners and admins hold it by default. Without it, opening the page quietly returns you to the studio dashboard rather than showing a refusal.

Build your team

Staff is an owner-only item in the sidebar under Administration. It is gated on Manage staff, which no other role holds by default — an admin only sees it if you grant it to them personally.

Classes, programs and the calendar

6 things to do here.

Connect Stripe and take payments

Billing is gated on View financials. Missing it sends you to a permission-denied page rather than hiding controls. Beyond that, three actions are owner-only — starting or resuming Stripe setup, the embedded onboarding form, and "Re-check with Stripe". The rest of the page works for any staff member who can reach it.

Still stuck on something?

The support portal has the rest, and a real person on the other end of it.

Visit support Talk to us