User roles and access control

Why roles matter more as you grow

In a five-person business, everyone knows everything. At twenty people, with salespeople, a billing desk, two accountants and a godown team, open access creates three problems: mistakes by people working outside their area, information leaking (rates, margins, dealer lists), and no clear accountability when something goes wrong. Roles fix all three without slowing anyone down, as long as they match real jobs.

Start with four or five roles

Resist creating a role for every person. Most MSMEs need only:

• Owner: everything, including settings, users and deletions.
• Admin or manager: runs operations, approves orders, manages masters, but does not change owner-level settings.
• Accountant: enters and checks vouchers, runs reports and GST data.
• Staff: billing desk, godown or counter staff with limited entry rights.
• Salesperson: items and their own customers, orders and visits, without company accounts.

A sample role matrix

Adjust to your business, but write it down. A written matrix makes it easy to answer "why can't I do this?" without arguments.

Approvals: the middle ground

Some actions are too risky to allow freely and too frequent to reserve for the owner. For these, use approvals:

• Orders from salespeople or counter staff, before dispatch.
• Discounts beyond the price list.
• Orders that take a customer over their credit limit.
• Deleting or altering an entry in a closed period.

Approvals keep work moving while leaving a clear record of who agreed. They also protect staff: a salesperson who gave a special rate with approval cannot be blamed later.

Separation of duties in small teams

The classic control is that the person who records a payment should not also approve it or reconcile the bank. In a small business you may not have enough people for perfect separation, but you can still split the riskiest pairs: the person who creates new supplier ledgers should not be the only one making payments to them, and the person who handles cash should not be the only one recording receipts. The internal controls guide goes deeper.

Common mistakes

• Everyone is admin. Usually because it was quicker during setup. It is the first thing to fix.
• Roles given to people, not jobs. When "Ramesh's role" outlives Ramesh's job change, access creeps up.
• Temporary access that never ends. A salesperson given accountant access to help at year end still has it in July.
• No owner backup. If only the owner can add or remove users and the owner is unreachable, a departing employee keeps access. Name a second trusted person with admin rights.
• Roles set in one system only. If the accounting software is locked down but the mobile app or shared drive is open, the weakest point decides your security.

Review access every quarter

1. Export or list every user and their role.
2. Remove anyone who has left or no longer needs access.
3. Check that nobody has a higher role than their job needs, often given "temporarily".
4. Look at activity for unusual patterns: logins at odd hours, many deletions, bulk exports.

Roles in Cashflow OS

In Cashflow OS, roles are set per company: owner, admin, accountant, staff and salesperson. A salesperson sees items and their own customers, not the company's accounts. Orders from frontline staff can be set to need approval, voucher deletion in Tally needs a reason and is limited to authorised users, and the owner can see the team's activity. Writing into Tally stays off until the owner switches it on for that company. See team roles and the guide to cost centres for salespeople.