Linda Artesani shows how to set up user roles and permissions in QuickBooks Online Plus. She creates a custom AP clerk account that can enter bills and credit-card charges but cannot access payroll, sales, or banking. Best practice: name users by job title, reuse the same contact when roles turn over, and adjust passwords rather than recreating users.
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Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. I wanted to do a short video on users and user permissions in QuickBooks Online, and specifically around— it's a little confusing because each product has a little bit different ability to add and fine-tune users. We have Simple Start, and that's a really basic stripped-down program. It allows you to have the master admin, which every file has one, and you have 2 other slots that are accountant users so they can see the whole file. If you want to get a little more restrictive on the users, you would move up to the Essentials. In Essentials, you get 3 users and you can create custom users there, and I will show you that a little bit further down in the video. And then in the Plus version, you will find that that has the most ability to fine-tune users. So I'm going to take you to the Plus version here, and I want to show you exactly how you can create a user. So in this file, we're going to come over to the gear, and I'm going to come over to Manage Users. So I've logged in as Master, and I want you to see that this has already got 2 users set up. Now the second user here is my admin person, and I gave them the ability to get through the whole file, but I restricted them from payroll, and I'll show you that setting. But I'm just going to pretend and add another user here. So I'm going to add a user. And you don't want to pick company admin. Company admin is really like if it's a husband and wife company and they each want to have their own login, which I would recommend, you would give that person company admin. They've got all the ability to get through the file, but it's really the same as a master admin. You've got the same capabilities. You don't want to really get too deep in there. You can pick a reports only, and then you can see here they can see all the reports except for the payroll. And then time tracking obviously would be for employees that need to log in. So if you're a contractor and you've got workers, employees out in the field, and they go to jobs and they want to enter their time specific to their job, they can use the time tracking. Neither time tracking or reports only, neither one of those count against your users. You can have many of those. But I'm going to create a custom user here. I'm going to hit next, and this is where we get into the part of about the payroll. So this other user that I've already created, I created it as all access but no payroll. So this is a custom user specific to that. I'm gonna fine-tune a little bit more than that, and I'm going to create a limited one. I'll make an accounts payable clerk. So you can see here exactly what they can do, and then here what they can't touch. So they can enter bills from vendors, they can enter credit card charges, anything accounts payable in nature they're going to be able to do. They're not going to be able to do anything maybe sales related or view the bank registers. None of that would be allowed on this specific user because it's got a specific purpose. So I'm going to hit OK. Do they submit their own timesheets? As a general rule, you would probably want that person to submit their own timesheets. They're probably an employee, but maybe they're not in the field, they're on salary, you just skip it and say no. So I'm going to hit Next, and then in here Normally by default all the nos are checked and I would recommend that. You don't want your accounts payable clerk having all that ability to go into the add and remove users or go in and edit your company information or manage any subscriptions. And I'm just going to create this very generically. So I'm creating a very simple contact, right? AP clerk. So I just named it AP and a clerk and then I gave it my email address. And I did that for a good reason. I don't want to have to create this over and over and over again if I have an AP clerk and then that person leaves and then another person comes in. I don't want to have to create it. I can change the password and restrict their access. So I'm going to log in now. I'm going to accept the invite and log in under that username. So now I've logged in under the user that I had set up as my admin. It was someone who had no I don't want her to really see the payroll. I'm a small business, I want to handle that myself, but I want her to be able to enter the sales, pay the bills, do everything except the payroll. So I just wanted you to see the screen of what they would see if they logged in as this person, and you can see here that it just shows up as a paycheck. I don't know who got paid $3,336.99, and even if I tried to see and I edited the check, I'm going to get a box that says, sorry, you don't have access. So I'm restricted from that piece. So anything to do with payroll, because I set that user up, that person cannot see that specific area. If I logged out of here and logged back in as my accounts payable clerk and I tried to get into sales or banking or any of the areas that I'm not allowed to see that's not accounts payable specific, I'm going to just keep seeing this warning over and over and over again. So that's what the user would see if you set them up as a custom user with restrictions. So that's it, that's it in a nutshell. It's not really difficult work, and if you take the time to really read through all the little help boxes, I think it'll really help you in figuring out how to set up your users. I will get in a little bit more detail in the blog post itself, but I just wanted to walk you through some of the steps so you could see how to set up someone. And recommended to create users based on your job titles with your website address, your email address. So for me, it's Artisani Bookkeeping. So it would be accounts payable clerk at Artisani Bookkeeping, accounts receivable clerk at Artisani Bookkeeping. And doing it that way, you control it. And then if somebody does leave your employ, you can just change the password and bring it on to the next person who comes in. Hope that's helpful, and see you around for more videos. If you need any help, please reach out to me. Thank you. Bye now.
