Team & Permissions
Departments: limiting what each person sees
Use departments to group products and suppliers, limit what people can see, and set default assignees for purchase orders.
Departments let one organisation be shared by teams that should not see each other's stock, such as a shop and a workshop, two product lines, or two sites run by different people. You put products and suppliers into departments and assign people to departments. Someone assigned to one or more departments then works only with what belongs to them.
Create departments
- Open Settings, then Departments.
- Type a name in the field at the top.
- Add it.
To rename a department, edit it in the list. To remove it, delete it.
The list shows how many products, suppliers and users each department has. The Departments page requires the Add / Edit / Delete Departments permission.
Your plan sets how many departments you can have: the Free plan includes one. At the limit, Department limit reached says what your plan includes.
Put products and suppliers into departments
A product or supplier can belong to several departments. Choose them in the Departments field of the product form or supplier form.
When you add a product to departments its supplier is not in, StockBold asks whether to add the supplier to those departments too, since a person needs to see a product's supplier. When you take a supplier out of a department, its products in that department are taken out too, and StockBold lists them first.
A product or supplier with no department is visible only to people with no department restriction. If someone limited to departments cannot find a product, check that it belongs to one of their departments.
Assign people to departments
- Open Settings, then Users, and select the person's row.
- Open the Departments tab.
- Tick the departments they should work in.
- Select Save.
All Departments is selected whenever no department is ticked, and it means no restriction at all. Leaving a person without departments is the widest setting, not the narrowest.
The organisation owner and anyone whose role is Admin always see every department. An Admin's Departments tab says so and cannot be changed. To limit an Admin to some departments, give them another role.
What a limited person sees
Someone assigned to departments sees only the products and suppliers in those departments, and everything built on them:
| Area | What they see |
|---|---|
| Products, inventory, movements, alerts and reports | Only products in their departments, and only those products' stock, movements and values. |
| Suppliers | Suppliers in their departments. A supplier from another department opens read-only, with a Read only tag, when they reach it through a purchase order they can see. |
| Purchase orders and shipments | Orders whose supplier is in one of their departments, or that contain at least one of their products. They cannot receive products outside their departments. |
| Stock counts | Counts with at least one of their products. Changing, submitting or approving a count needs every product on it to be theirs. |
| Supplier claims | Claims whose supplier is in their departments, or that hold one of their products. |
| Assembly | Projects and templates with at least one of their products. Editing, completing, reopening, deleting or copying one needs every product in it to be theirs. |
A supplier or product they create goes into their own departments. On a supplier or product they can add or remove only their own departments: other departments stay as they are, and at least one of theirs has to remain, or they would no longer see it.
The dashboard follows the same rule for its figures and lists, so two colleagues in different departments can see different totals. The Getting started list is the exception: its steps are about the whole organisation.
Set default assignees per department
In Settings, then Organization, the owner sets who is assigned by default to approve new purchase orders, receive their shipments and handle their payments. Under Department Defaults, the same three, Default Approver, Default Shipping and Default Payment, can be set for each department.
A department's defaults are used when an order clearly belongs to that one department: its supplier is in that department only, or, for a supplier in several departments, every product on the order is in the same one of them. In every other case, the organisation-wide defaults are used.
If a department has at least one default set, its empty ones are left unassigned for that department's orders rather than taken from the organisation-wide defaults. If a department has none set, the organisation-wide defaults apply. Set all three for a department, or none.