QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Restricting Access to Features and Data

When several people work on your company file, it’s safer to limit what each person can do. For example, Trusty Ted has earned his nickname, so you could set his login up with access to every QuickBooks feature, including sensitive financial reports and accounting activities. And Myra Meddler can’t keep a secret, but there’s no one faster at data entry, so you want to make sure that she gets no further than doing the checking, credit cards, and bill paying.

If a person chooses a command and doesn’t have permission for that feature, QuickBooks displays a warning message that identifies the permission needed to perform that action. In case the lack of permission was a mistake or an oversight, the warning message also suggests asking the QuickBooks administrator to grant that permission.

What the Access Areas Represent

When you tell QuickBooks that a user should have access only to selected areas of the program, you have to tell QuickBooks which areas the person can use. For each area, you can give the user either full access or selective access, as explained in the next section. As you click Next, the “Set up user password and access” dialog box steps through one area at a time, as you can see in Figure 26-4. There’s some overlap, because each area actually covers a lot of ground:

• Sales and accounts receivable. This area includes creating sales transactions with any kind of sales form (invoices, sales receipts, statements, and so on) and with any ...