Roles and access: how to delegate sales and not lose control

Roles and access rights

The dilemma of every business owner

Business growth inevitably leads to the need to hire employees and delegate authority to them. Along with this comes one of the main dilemmas for an owner: how to entrust part of the processes to others without losing control. Fear of mistakes, abuse, or even outright fraud by staff often becomes a serious barrier to growth.

Delegating sales, warehouse access, and customer management seems especially risky. Will an employee sell goods “off the books”? Will they use customer discounts for personal gain? Will they leak commercial information to competitors? These concerns are justified, but they should not slow down the development of your business.

Modern accounting systems such as Torgsoft help resolve this dilemma. They turn the abstract fear of losing control into a transparent and manageable process. With flexible role and access settings, you can give employees exactly the tools they need to work — and nothing more — while ensuring full accountability for every action.

1. More than just “admin” and “user”: a flexible access hierarchy

The control system in Torgsoft is built on a three-level hierarchy that allows access to be configured with surgical precision. It is important to clearly distinguish between these concepts:

Role. This is the highest level of configuration that defines functional capabilities. A role (for example, “Salesperson”, “Inventory Manager”, “Accountant”) determines which modes, forms, buttons, and columns are available to an employee in the system overall. For example, you can allow the “Salesperson” role to open the sales form while hiding the financial reports menu. These settings are global for everyone assigned to this role.
User. This is an account linked to a specific role but limited to certain data. If a role grants access to functions, a user grants access to information. For example, you may have two salespeople in two different stores. Both have the “Salesperson” role and see the same interface, but the user “Salesperson_Store_1” sees only their store’s warehouse, cash desk, and documents, while “Salesperson_Store_2” sees theirs.
Employee. This is a specific individual linked to a user account. This level is needed for personalized tracking. For example, if two people work in shifts on one computer under the same “Salesperson” user, linking individual employees allows you to track each person’s performance separately and correctly calculate wages.

This three-level system is extremely flexible. On one hand, you can instantly apply mass changes for all employees in the same position by editing just the role. On the other hand, you can configure individual restrictions for each store or even a specific workstation via user settings.

2. Restrictions against common fraud schemes

A flexible access system allows you to block the most common fraud schemes at the software level. Here are several concrete examples of how specific restrictions prevent abuse:

Prohibiting changes to sale price and price list price. This is one of the key restrictions. If a salesperson cannot manually change the item price on a receipt, they cannot perform a classic scheme: take full payment from the customer, register the sale with a discount in the system, and pocket the difference.

Disable “Change price by price list” and “Sale price in sales document” for salespeople. Then they will not be able to rewrite price tags or change prices during sales to keep the difference.

Hiding “Date of birth” and “Gender” fields in the customer card. Some discounts may be tied to a customer’s birthday. To prevent a salesperson from using this data to grant a fictitious discount to a “friendly” customer, these fields can simply be hidden.
Allowing returns only with a receipt. This restriction prevents fraudulent returns, where a dishonest employee processes a return for an item that was never actually returned and takes cash from the register.
Minimum sale price control. To avoid unprofitable transactions (intentional or accidental), the system can be configured so that the sale price cannot drop below cost with a minimum markup applied. The program automatically controls the discount size.

3. A log that sees everything

Even with the strictest restrictions, the question arises: how can you know what exactly an employee did during the day? For this, Torgsoft provides a powerful tool — “User Activity Log”.

This tool records absolutely any action in the system: creating invoices, printing price tags, changing settings, deleting items from receipts. Moreover, it even logs attempts to perform prohibited actions. If a salesperson tries to open a form they do not have access to, the system records it as a warning.

The key feature that makes this tool indispensable for security is its protection against manipulation. Individual records in the log cannot be edited.

No user, even the owner with full rights, can edit the data in this form.

This means the log is an objective and indisputable digital trail of all events in the system, which disciplines staff. However, as a business owner, you should be aware of an important nuance: while editing records is blocked for everyone, deleting data for a certain period is an administrative function. An administrator can delete records up to a certain date or clear the log when deleting statistics for closed periods. This is a crucial distinction: the log is protected from staff tampering in daily work, but remains manageable for the owner in terms of long-term data storage.

4. Control not only actions, but also access to information

Business security is not only about controlling operations, but also about protecting commercial secrets. A salesperson or cashier does not need to know how much you earn on each item or the store’s total turnover. Granting access to such information may lead to demotivation, industrial espionage, or misuse of data.

The role system allows flexible restriction of sensitive data visibility. Here is what you can (and should) hide from certain employees:

Purchase and wholesale prices. A salesperson should know the retail price, but cost and markup information is unnecessary.
Summary data. You can prohibit viewing total quantities and values of goods in stock, as well as sales volumes for specific periods.
Stock quantities during inventory counts. To prevent manipulation of results, you can hide the system-recorded actual quantities during stocktaking.
Stock balances of other stores in the chain. If not required for work (for example, for transfer orders), a salesperson should see only their own accounting center.

This approach protects your commercial secrets and allows each employee to focus solely on their duties without being distracted by unnecessary information.

5. Logs are not only for punishment, but also for recovery

Control tools are often perceived as means of surveillance and punishment. However, they have another equally important side — insurance against human error and unintentional mistakes. One such tool is the “Document Change Log”.

This mode records any changes in warehouse and financial documents (receipts, sales, write-offs, etc.). While it can be used to detect fraud, it is also a powerful data recovery mechanism.

There is a real case where an employee, trying to delete one extra item from a large purchase invoice, accidentally deleted the entire document. This could have caused serious accounting issues and data loss. However, thanks to the “Document Change Log”, technical support specialists were able to see the full list of items, prices, and quantities from the deleted invoice and fully restore it, saving the business time and money.

Fear of losing control when expanding staff is natural, but modern automation tools prove that delegating authority is possible and necessary without sacrificing security. A flexible role system, precise restrictions, and immutable activity logs turn control from an emotional issue of trust into a structured and transparent system.

This approach allows each employee to access only the information and functions required for their job. It minimizes the risk of errors, prevents most fraud schemes, and protects commercial secrets.

So the question is not whether to trust employees, but how to build a system where trust is supported by transparency and control. How do you build such a system in your business?