Roles & permissions

When you invite someone to your organization, you give them a role. The role decides what they can see and do — from drafting invoices to approving bills to reading your financial reports.

AccountFUN ships with six ready-made roles that cover most teams. If none of them is quite right, you can build your own: pick a name, switch on exactly the permissions that person needs, and assign it like any other role.

The six ready-made roles

Role	Best for	What they can do
Admin	Owners	Everything — all of the below, plus organization settings, members and roles, imports and data management, and the subscription
Accountant	Bookkeepers & accountants	Everything except organization administration — full document work, approvals, banking, chart of accounts, manual journals, projects, fixed assets, files, templates, reports
Standard	Day-to-day team	Create, submit, approve, and void documents across sales and purchases, record payments, manage contacts, projects, file their own expense claims, view reports
Sales	Sales reps	Sales documents only — invoices, quotes, customer credit notes, customer prepayments — plus contacts
Purchase	Purchasing	Purchase documents only — bills, purchase orders, supplier credit notes, supplier prepayments — plus contacts
Employee	Everyone else	Personal expense claims only — file and submit their own claims for reimbursement

The Admin role is built in and always has every permission — including any new permission added to AccountFUN in the future. You can rename it or tweak its description, but you can’t strip its permissions or delete it — every organization needs at least one full-access role.

Sales and purchases stay separate

The two document areas are walled off from each other. A role with Sales Documents but not Purchase Documents (like the ready-made Sales role) never sees your bills, purchase orders, or what you owe suppliers — and a Purchase role never sees your invoices, quotes, or what customers owe you. That applies everywhere the documents show up:

• the document lists and the documents themselves, including printing, emailing, sharing links, and attachments,
• the dashboard’s owed to you and you owe figures,
• a contact’s activity page, payments, and recurring templates.

Credit notes and prepayments follow the side they belong to: customer credit notes and prepayments are sales documents, supplier ones are purchase documents. A role with both areas (Standard, Accountant, Admin) sees everything.

Reference data is shared. Anyone with either document area can look up your Chart of Accounts, Products & Services, Tax Rates, and Tracking Categories — they need them to code their documents. Changing them still takes the matching permission below; without it those pages are read-only.

Custom roles

Settings → Roles. Ready-made roles not quite right? Build your own:

1. Go to Settings → Roles and click New Role.
2. Give it a name and description — e.g. “Bookkeeper — reconciles but doesn’t approve” or “Sales rep — invoices and reports, no banking”.
3. Switch on the permissions that role should have (see below).
4. Save, then assign it to members from Settings → Members.

Editing a role later applies to everyone who has it — change the permissions once and the whole team updates instantly. Custom roles can be deleted once nobody is assigned to them; the six ready-made roles can be edited but not deleted.

The permissions you can mix and match

Documents — which document areas the role reaches, and what it can do there:

• Sales Documents — invoices, quotes, customer credit notes, and customer prepayments.
• Purchase Documents — bills, purchase orders, supplier credit notes, and supplier prepayments.
• Create Drafts, Submit For Approval, Delete Documents, and Record Payments.
• Payment Schedules — view payment schedules and split sales into scheduled payments. Needs Sales Documents; creating one also needs Create Drafts and Approve Documents, because payments that are already due are invoiced and approved straight away.

A role without either document area (and without any of the other areas below) is limited to expense claims — like the Employee role.

Approvals — the sign-off levers:

• Approve Documents — approve documents (this posts them to the books).
• Void Documents — void approved or submitted documents.
• Approve Expense Claims and Void Expense Claims.

Contacts & Claims — Manage Contacts (create and edit customers and suppliers), plus Create Expense Claims and Submit Expense Claims for one’s own claims.

Accounting — the bookkeeping machinery:

• Chart Of Accounts — add and edit ledger accounts.
• Manual Journals — view, create, record, and void manual journal entries (voiding also needs Void Documents).
• Products & Services, Tax Rates, and Tracking Categories — manage each list.
• Bank Accounts — see bank balances and transactions, reconcile statements, manage bank feeds and rules, and spend, receive, or transfer money.
• Find & Recode — bulk-recode journal lines across documents.
• Reports — view the financial reports described below.
• Fixed Assets — register, depreciate, and dispose of assets.
• File Folders — organize the File Manager’s folders (needs File Manager too).

Projects — view projects and their profitability, and create or run them (together with Create Drafts, Approve Documents, Void Documents, or Delete Documents for each action). Linking a document to a project also needs that document’s area.

Files — File Manager: the central list of every file in the organization, plus Contracts.

Email & Templates — Email Outbox (delivery status of every email your organization sends) and Templates & Reminders (open the template library, design document and email templates, and manage automatic invoice reminders).

Record Payments vs Bank Accounts

Record Payments lets someone record a payment or receipt against an invoice or bill and choose which bank account the money moved through. It does not show that account’s balance or transactions — that’s the Bank Accounts permission. So your Standard team can pay bills without seeing your bank balances.

The editor keeps you honest

Some permissions only work together — approving expense claims needs the document and approval permissions, and File Folders needs File Manager. The role editor warns you live when a combination doesn’t work, so you can fix it before saving.

Who can see the reports

Your financial reports — balance sheet, profit & loss, trial balance, aging, and the rest — are governed by the Reports permission. Roles that have it see the Reports menu and can run any report; roles without it don’t see the menu at all, and the dashboard hides the profit figures from them too.

Of the ready-made roles, Admin, Accountant, and Standard include Reports; Sales, Purchase, and Employee do not — so by default your sales reps and buyers can’t read your profit numbers. Want a rep to see reports anyway? Give them a custom role with Reports switched on.

Admin-only jobs

Some things stay with Admins no matter how a custom role is set up:

• organization settings, currencies, billing, and region add-ons,
• inviting members, and creating or assigning roles,
• Import and Migrate from Xero — the Xero migration replaces all of the organization’s existing data, so it’s never delegated,
• Opening Balances — they set the starting point of your whole ledger, so only Admins can post or void them,
• data export/import and audit history.

View-only access

Every role has a view-only switch. Flip it on and the person can see everything their permissions allow — documents, bank accounts, reports — but change nothing. It’s designed for the people who should look, not touch:

• an accountant reviewing the books before year-end,
• a business partner or investor who wants visibility,
• a new hire learning the ropes before they get the keys.

Assigning and changing roles

Settings → Members. (Managing members and roles is an Admin-only job.)

• Inviting someone: new invitations start on the Standard role — pick a different one from the dropdown before sending. The recipient must accept the invitation before gaining access. New teammates can sign up after receiving it; existing users must accept too.
• Changing a role: pick a new one from the dropdown next to the person’s name. It takes effect on their very next click — no re-login needed.
• Removing someone: click Remove next to their name to take them off the team entirely. Pending invitations are listed separately and can be revoked before they’re accepted.

See the expense claims guide for how roles affect who can see and approve each claim.

Example: a small sales team

Acme has an owner, a bookkeeper, two sales reps, and a warehouse buyer.

1. The owner is Admin; the bookkeeper gets Accountant.
2. Both reps get Sales: they raise quotes and invoices and chase customers, but never see supplier bills, the bank balance, or the profit and loss.
3. The buyer gets Purchase: bills, purchase orders, and supplier credit notes — nothing from the sales side.
4. The owner wants the senior rep to see how sales are tracking against the plan, so they build a custom “Senior sales” role — Sales plus Reports — and assign it to that rep. The other rep keeps plain Sales.