Business Settings vs. Personal Preferences
Why the same setting appears in two places, which one wins, and what "Default to Business Settings" really means.
Perceny stores most behaviour twice: once for the business, and once, optionally, for each person. Understanding the relationship saves a lot of confused troubleshooting.
The two placesCopy a link to this section
Features Configuration (Business Settings → Features Configuration) is the business default. It applies to everyone who has not said otherwise.
Preferences, also called Work Settings, is one person's override. Managers reach it from a stylist's row or the calendar header; a member reaches their own from their account.
How an override worksCopy a link to this section
A personal preference is a delta, not a copy. Each one has three states:
- Default to Business Settings: no override. The person follows the business.
- Yes: an explicit override, on.
- No: an explicit override, off.
That third state matters. Setting something to No is not the same as leaving it on Default, even when the business setting is currently off: if you later turn the business setting on, the Default person follows and the No person does not.
This is why Perceny shows most personal preferences as a three-way choice rather than a switch. A plain on/off switch would silently turn "inherit" into "explicitly off" the first time anyone opened the screen.
Saving only what you touchedCopy a link to this section
When you save Preferences, Perceny sends only the fields you actually changed. Everything you did not touch stays on Default. That is deliberate: saving the whole form would freeze every inherited value as an explicit override and quietly detach that person from future business changes.
Which fields can be overriddenCopy a link to this section
Not all of them. The list of preferences a member may edit about themselves is set by the owner under Features Configuration → Member Management Settings → Select editable options.
Managers are not limited by that list; it describes self-service only. A manager editing a member through the member editor sees and can set every field.
When a change does not seem to applyCopy a link to this section
Work through it in this order:
- Is there a personal override? Open that person's Preferences and search for the setting. If it says Yes or No rather than Default, the business setting is not in play for them.
- Is it the right level? Some things only exist business-wide (website settings, terminology, integrations). If you are hunting for one of those in Preferences, you will not find it.
- Is it a permission rather than a setting? "They cannot see the page" is usually a permission, not a switch. See Roles and permissions explained.
- Did the change need approval? Depending on your setup, a member's own change can go to a manager as a request instead of applying immediately. Check Requests.