Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in August 2017 and has been fully updated and improved in October 2024 to be comprehensive and easily understood.
If you are already using Megaventory or even if you just have a business with more than one employee, you may be familiar with the need to restrict users to specific processes and modules within the software. Because we understand your need for privacy settings and varying access levels for individual team members, one of the very first developments in Megaventory was the ability of administrators to grant different levels of access to their accounts. This feature is particularly valuable in accounting software for multiple businesses, as illustrated by the following example of a franchise chain:
A franchise store owner may have access to issue orders and view reports of his store but will be denied access to stores of other franchisees. A Sales manager of the franchisor company may have access to sales reports from all the franchisee stores. Each franchise store may use Megaventory to send their Purchase Orders directly to the main warehouse of the franchise company.
So with this opportunity, let’s see the detailed user permissions you can provide to your business in Megaventory in an example with three scenarios, each introducing additional complexity.
Scenario 1: Invoicing Based On Location
If your company has more than one sales point, you can grant access to different users accordingly. In other words, your employee in Boston will not be able to handle work related to your shop in New York, such as seeing that location’s inventory levels, sales and purchase orders, relevant reports, etc.
This setting, apart from keeping your company’s information secure, will also save valuable time for your team members. For example, when loading the available accounting documents to fulfill an order, the user will only see the documents related to their location with no need to filter out irrelevant entries.
So, in the example above, we have visited the User Access Permissions page for the user Employee A. As you can see, the user has “Read and Write” rights to the main warehouse regarding stock transactions and invoicing. In other words, they have the right to view and create documents and invoices regarding this location only. At the same time, the permissions for the secondary store location are set to “None,” and the user has no access whatsoever to documents and invoices related to that location.
Scenario 2: Retail vs Wholesale Invoicing
Another possible scenario where user permissions come into play is when a business is selling at both retail and wholesale prices. That’s a typical evolution of a company as it grows—to expand into B2C apart from B2B (or vice versa), and that can be supported in Megaventory, which serves as an effective accounting software for multiple businesses.
In this scenario, if your customer is an individual or a company entity, a different price list should load when you create a sales order. On top of that, you may have different people to manage B2C and B2B sales.
So in Megaventory, you can create two different types of invoices—one for retail and one for wholesale. Following that, you can grant access to both of them to a user that handles wholesale purchases and sales. Alternatively, you can choose to limit a user so that they can do either and not both.
In the above image, the user has access to both types of invoices. In a different example where they have access to one of them only, the drop-down menu would show just that one option.
Scenario 3: Multiple Companies Under A Single Account
With the Megaventory inventory management system, you can—to a certain extent—manage different companies with a single Megaventory subscription, making it an ideal accounting software for multiple businesses. Setting your account like this makes sense if two (or more) companies share a common inventory or you need to cut down your expenses across various projects (is there really a need to pay for a separate ERP system for every new venture you have going?).
So, to follow up on our previous example, here’s what you can do if your business grows and you’d like to have a separate company for a different product line or region—but still serve both entities from the same stock.
You are able to grant permission to each employee to issue a different invoice depending on the company they are working for. So, the employee who works in company A will only see an invoice format for company A when trying to fulfill a sales order in Megaventory. Similarly, the same employee will have no access to the invoice format of company B.
In Summary
Megaventory offers flexible user permissions that allow businesses to control access based on location, invoicing type, or company. This ensures secure and efficient operations by granting specific employees the ability to view and handle only relevant documents and processes. Whether managing multiple locations, retail versus wholesale invoicing, or even multiple companies under a single account, these permissions help streamline workflows, reduce errors, and maintain data privacy
Sarah Moore is a Digital Marketer for Megaventory the online inventory management system that can assist medium-sized businesses in coordinating supplies across multiple stores.