One person running the stock needs no permissions. The moment there are two, the system has a question it cannot avoid: who is allowed to do what. Most businesses answer it by giving everyone everything, because it is quicker, and discover the cost the first time a movement nobody can explain turns up in the history.
Permissions are not about trust. They are about making sure a mistake is seen by someone other than the person who made it.
Four separations worth keeping
Raising an order and approving it. Whoever asks for the spend should not be the one who authorises it. In a team of three the owner approves; in a larger one, each department has an approver. The point is a second pair of eyes on every commitment.
Receiving goods and approving the order. The person at the dock records what arrived. If that person also approved the order, a short delivery can be quietly matched to a corrected order and nobody is the wiser.
Moving stock and seeing its value. Warehouse staff need quantities, locations and shelves. They do not need to know that the pallet is worth €40,000, and a system that shows it to everyone has a confidentiality problem for no operational gain.
Correcting stock and running the count. A count finds a difference; a correction fixes it. When the person who runs the count also posts the correction with no second look, the count stops being a check.
None of these requires a large team. They require that two names, not one, appear on each chain of events.
Who needs to see values
Fewer people than usually have it. Values are needed by whoever sets prices, whoever approves spend, whoever prepares the accounts, and the owner. Buyers see the prices on their own orders in any case. Everyone else works in quantities.
Hiding values is not only about confidentiality. It also removes a temptation: a stock figure that looks expensive invites a correction, and a figure that is just a quantity invites a recount.
Roles as a starting point, not a cage
Named roles save time: administrator, buyer, accounts, warehouse operator. Assign the role, and the person gets the usual set. But people do not fit roles exactly. The warehouse lead who also raises orders for consumables, the bookkeeper who runs the year-end count. Set the role, then adjust individual permissions, and keep a record of what was changed and why.
Two rules keep this tidy:
- Grant the single permission, not a bigger role. The bookkeeper gets stock counts, not administrator.
- Take away rather than add when in doubt. A permission nobody uses is a permission nobody will notice being misused.
Departments and visibility
When different parts of the business buy and hold different things, limit each person to their own department’s products, movements and orders. The workshop sees workshop stock. It is less about secrecy than about noise: a list of 200 products is workable, a list of 3,000 is not.
Keep names on everything
Every movement, every order, every approval and every correction should carry the name of the person who did it and the time. Permissions decide who can act; the history shows who did. The second is what makes the first worth having, because a review of the movement history is the only way to find out that a permission is in the wrong hands.
Things to do once a quarter
- Compare the user list with the payroll. Anyone who has left loses access the same day, and their past actions stay in the history under their name.
- Read the permissions of anyone with approval rights. Approval creep is the most common drift.
- Check who can see values. The list grows and rarely shrinks.
- Turn on two-factor authentication for every account that can approve, pay or change settings.
Permissions in StockBold
In StockBold around 40 individual permissions each cover one action: recording movements, deleting them, receiving deliveries, creating orders, approving them, handling costs and payments, running counts, locking years, managing users, viewing values. Five roles are templates that copy a set of permissions onto a person: Admin, Purchasing, Accounting, Operator and Organization Manager. An Operator, for instance, records movements and works on assemblies but does not see values or reports. You can grant or remove single permissions on top of any role, and a permission you have removed stays removed even if the role changes later.
Some decisions stay with the owner alone: organisation settings, the valuation method, the full data export, and handing the organisation to someone else. Approvers can be set per department, and a person can be limited to selected departments’ products, movements and orders. Anyone without the permission to see values sees quantities everywhere and no amounts. Every movement and every approval is recorded with a name and a time, and when someone is removed they lose access at once while their history stays. Two-factor authentication is available on every account, and API keys never hold more permissions than their owner.
Read more about team, roles and permissions, or the help guide on how permissions decide what each person sees.