Last year, QuickBooks introduced role-based access and custom controls for QBO-Accountant to help firms manage their team members' access to their firm's books. But for access to a clients' books, firm permissions have pretty much been yes (they have access) or no (they don't have access).
As accounting firms grew and added team members, they determined that there was a need to segregate duties and delegate work that their employees could do for the firm’s clients. Firms needed the ability to limit a user’s access to specific client functions in order to reduce risk and provide confidence in using solutions integrated into QBO-Accountant.
This month, QuickBooks is rolling out the first step in a new role-based access control feature that allows accounting firms to manage their team’s access to their clients' books. This initial phase includes the ability to assign firm team members to predefined roles for a specific client's books.
This new functionality will be available for QBO-Accountant access to their client’s books and can be configured using the ‘team tab’ within QBO-Accountant. This feature is scheduled to be available to all ProAdvisors using QBO-Accountant in the United States by the end of June.
On the Team tab within QBO-Accountant you have the ability to Add a New User, (1) above. You can also Assign access level to your firm's books, (2) above, for that user.
As we move on down the page, we see the ‘what’s new (or soon to be) section’ (3) above. This section lets you add access to your various client's books for this user. This section contains a list of your firm’s clients.
Select any client, (4) above. Then click Assign access, (5) above. From here you can assign any of the new preassigned roles available.
For each role you can click to see more detail about the various permissions available along with granularity into what you can and can’t do. Once you have determined upon a role, click to Save that role to the user’s profile.
You should be aware that you are not limited in assigning these new roles to a single role per user. You can assign multiple different roles to the same user for the same client or different clients.
This means that one of your employees can serve as the payroll manager for one-third of your clients, can be a payments processor for another third of your clients, and perform both of those roles for the remaining third of your clients.
We can look forward to finding further ‘role-play’ in this functionality in future enhancements, along with the ability to customize roles. I’m sure you will all agree that this is a necessary functionality for large firms using QBO-Accountant to not only manage their client’s books, but manage their team members working on the books of those clients.
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