What are the 3 types of user permissions you can choose from in QuickBooks Online when adding new team members to your firm?

My good friend and QBOShow.com co-host, Woody Adams, has written yet another great piece. This time, he breaks down QBOA team permissions.

QBOA = QuickBooks Online Accountant

Team = Firm staff you invite to QBOA Team

The below permissions are set in the Firm Administration and Books tab in the team member’s record. You access this page by clicking on Team tab in QBOA (assuming you have access), then click on team member name in list you want to affect.. Regardless of the below QBOA team member access level settings, team members are Company Admins on any QBO client file to which they have access. 

Basic Access Level Settings—This team member is completely Basic access level. All they see is the Clients and ProAdvisor tabs in the firm QBOA. Essentially, this is for the staff that you only want to access the clients you want them to access, and nothing else. Absolutely NO firm admin duties allowed. There is only one Basic option, and it is the mode in the screenshot below. If you allow access to any other field, Access mode turns to Custom:

By changing anything in the access column drop downs, the type of access changes to “Custom”

There are different options for QBOA Team member permissions for your firm’s books and client access

Custom Access Level Setting—Manage your clients

The first Custom access level is for the Basic staff team member needing the ability to Add a QBO client sub to the firm QBOA. You choose Yes for Manage your clients setting. As you can see in the next picture below, Firm Admin and Firm Books are still completely restricted, but I have the ability to allow a team member to add a QBO sub. The team member will see nothing in QBOA but the Clients they have access to, ProAdvsor tab and the Add Client tab. While the team member can add the QBO sub to Wholesale Billing, he or she cannot edit, view, or manage Wholesale billing settings at all. Nor can this team member move existing clients under Wholesale. As well, this team member cannot assign other team members to the newly added QBO sub. Net, net: I can give a QBOA team member the ability to add a QBO sub, add it to wholesale, work on their appropriate assigned clients, and get certified in QBO as a free ProAdvisor.

This QBOA team member has NO other firm admin abilities:

This QBOA team member will have no access to the firms books, aka “YOUR BOOKS”

Custom Access Level Settings—The Rest

Note: I decided not to test any View Only settings per access level, as why would I set a team member to view something if I didn’t want them to have access to modify it?  Also, I kept the Manage your clients set to Yes for all of the following, which you may or may not want to do depending on need. We just broke down Manage your clients so hopefully this does not cause any confusion.

Firm Information Edit, All other settings None, Manage your clients Yes—No differences noted. As far as I can tell in my testing, this minor setting change makes no difference to the above Basic team member with Manage your clients set to Yes.

Firm Information Edit, Firm Users Edit, Manage your clients Yes—The team member now has some firm administrative access. Upon giving team member Edit access to Firm Users, team member can now see Clients they have access to, Team tab, ProAdvisor tab, Add Client (remember, Manage your clients set to Yes), and Your Books. Team member can add staff to the team and edit any staff member save for the QBOA Master admin. While the team member sees Your Books, they have no access to it. All Your Books pages throw a “We’re Sorry warning.”

This QBOA team member still has no access to manage wholesale billing or see the firm credit card, nor can they move existing clients not under Wholesale to Wholesale billing:

This QBOA team member won’t be able to edit Wholesale Billing information.

Firm information Edit, Firm users Edit, Subscriptions and billing Edit, Manage your clients Yes—All same abilities as the above setting, with the addition to Edit billing information for Wholesale Billing, aka, access and change the firm credit card. This team member can still NOT move existing QBO clients not under Wholesale to Wholesale, nor manage any wholesale billing duties that have to do with adding payroll, upgrading Essentials to Plus, cancelling payroll or removing a client from Wholesale billing.

This QBOA team member can edit Wholesale Billing settings.

Firm Administration Access Edit for all, Your Firm Books Customers and A/R Yes, Manage your clients Yes—The below setting allows the team member to access all customer and sales related forms and reports in the Your Books file, plus the same permissions allowed in the above setting. The team member will have NO access to chart of accounts, registers, online banking, vendor/expense related forms and reports, attachments, budgeting, bank reconciliation or payroll.

This QBOA team member does have access to time forms and reports. NO access to financial reports.

Custom access for this QBOA team member.

Full Access Level Setting—This team member has access to all areas and tasks in QBOA, as well as all the permissions allowed in the settings above. The only move this team member cannot make is remove the Master admin of QBOA. This team member has access to all of the Your Books file, including Payroll, registers, banking and financial reports. The Full team member is basically a Company admin of QBOA.

Only the Master Admin is greater than Company Admin, but not by much.

Woody also has a lot of great product videos. He’s also written other articles for StacyK.net.

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