Roles and permissions

The idea

A role is a named set of rights. People get one or more roles, and the roles decide what they can open, change and submit. User permissions narrow one person further, for example to a single warehouse. You can check the result without changing anything.

The screens use example data from a demo company. Your own Parsimony site has your own roles and users. For the overview of roles, see Getting Started, lesson six.

Step by step

What a role is

1. Open the Role list in the Users area. In this example it shows 49 roles.

Step 1. Read a role's rights

1. In the Users area, open Permissions and choose Role Permissions Manager.
2. Pick a document type, such as Sales Order. Each row is one role.
3. The columns are the rights: Select, Read, Write, Create, Delete, Submit and Cancel. The Level column is the permission level: level zero covers the whole document, and a level-one row covers only the fields marked for level one.
4. Only look. A change here applies to everyone with that role.

Step 2. Restrict one person with a user permission

1. Open User Permission in the same menu. A list shows each restriction; in this example it is empty.
2. Choose Add User Permission. Pick the User, pick Warehouse (or Customer) in Allow, then pick the value in For Value.
3. Apply To All Document Types is ticked by default, so the limit follows the person everywhere.
4. Choose Save only when you mean it.

Step 3. Check what a person can see

1. Open the report Permitted Documents For User.
2. Pick the User and a DocType, and tick Show Permissions.
3. The report lists the documents the person can open, with ticks for Read, Write and Create.

What you may see on your own site

• Your administrator may have added roles of their own, and your rights table may have more or fewer rows.
• Menu names can differ slightly if your site has been customised.

Common mistakes

1. Ticking a right to fix one person. The change applies to everyone with that role. Use a user permission or another role.
2. Forgetting that a user permission follows the person everywhere. Apply To All Document Types is ticked by default.
3. Changing a role before checking. Run Permitted Documents For User first.