Permissions & Roles

JewelTrak controls access with permission groups — named roles like Manager, Sales, or Back Office. A group is a set of permissions it grants. Access is default-deny: a user can only do what their groups grant — anything not granted is simply unavailable.

What a group can grant

Permissions are action-level. For each module you grant the specific actions a role should have:

• View / Create / Edit / Delete on the selling side — Inventory, Watches, Diamonds, Colored Stones, Pearls, Parcels, Invoices, Memos, Memo Returns, Returns, Repairs, Appraisals, Custom Builds, and Contacts.
• View / Create / Edit / Delete on the buying and back-office side — Purchase Orders, Vendor Invoices, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Gift Cards & Store Credit, Inventory Count, Metal Buying (Scrap), and Styles (Design Catalog).
• View / Edit on Online Channels and Partnerships.
• Void on the things that get reversed rather than deleted — Invoices, Memos, Memo Returns, Returns, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Metal Buying, and Gift Cards.
• Capabilities that cross modules: View Cost / Margin, Enter Cost on Non-Stocked Lines, Apply Order Discounts, Trade Negotiation Fields, Override Price, Modify Price Tiers, View All Stores, and Manage Users.

View Cost / Margin vs. Enter Cost on Non-Stocked Lines. These are two different keys, and the second is deliberately much narrower. View Cost / Margin is all-or-nothing: it shows what the shop paid for a piece it stocks. Enter Cost on Non-Stocked Lines shows only what the shop pays for work it is about to do — a misc, repair, custom-job or trade line on an invoice, and the vendor or bench fee on each step of a work order. A salesperson who holds it can build and cost a repair or a custom job without ever seeing the merchant cost of a ring in the case. The built-in Sales Staff group gets the narrow one by default — costing a repair is counter work — and does not get View Cost / Margin.

• The dashboard’s own two: Dashboard: Sales Chart, and Dashboard: Open Balances & Action Items.
• Cost-revealing reports (Profit, Vendor Cost, Inventory Valuation), granted on top of Reports → View.

So you can express precise roles — e.g. Sales can view inventory but not edit it, and create invoices but not void them.

Selling is one thing; the shop’s numbers are another

A salesperson needs Invoices → View to open the invoice they are working on. That is not the same as being shown what the shop took last month, or every customer who currently owes money — but both live on the dashboard, and until you say otherwise they are off:

• Dashboard: Sales Chart — the sales history graph.
• Dashboard: Open Balances & Action Items — open receivables, payables, memos, work orders and partnership payouts, plus the attention strip that counts the same things on a phone.

Neither is granted to the built-in Sales Staff group, and neither has anything to do with cost: these are your takings and what you are owed, not what you paid. Turn them on for a manager either by granting them to a group, or for one person on Settings → Manage Users.

Administrators always see both.

Four things that are their own permission

Most actions are undone by editing the record again. These four are not, so they sit on their own line in the Capabilities section rather than being folded into an Edit box:

• Write Off (bad debt / metal loss) — makes money owed, or a metal lot’s value, simply stop existing.
• Post Inventory Count Adjustments — the single step in a count that rewrites quantity on hand. Counting items and reviewing a variance are ordinary edits; posting is where a shortage becomes the new truth, so it’s worth deciding separately who may do it.
• Merge Customer Records — irreversible. The duplicate’s invoices, memos, repairs and payment history all move to the surviving record and the duplicate is gone.
• Metals Compliance — placing and releasing police holds, and marking a lot as reported. These are obligations to your jurisdiction, and releasing a hold early is the part that gets a store in trouble.

None of these are granted to any group automatically. An administrator has them (administrators bypass everything) and decides who else does.

If you’re upgrading an existing store

Purchase Orders, Vendor Invoices, AR/AP, Inventory Count, Metal Buying, Gift Cards, Styles, Returns, Online Channels and Partnerships used to have no permission boxes at all — every signed-in employee could use them. When those boxes appeared, your existing groups kept View, Create and Edit on all of them, so nobody’s day changed.

Delete and Void did not carry over, and neither did the four capabilities above. That’s deliberate: those are the actions worth choosing rather than inheriting. If a bookkeeper reports they can no longer delete a vendor invoice or void a payment, that’s this — tick the box for their group and they’re set.

It’s worth 10 minutes with Settings → Permission Groups to look at the new rows and decide what each role should actually have.

Groups only grant — they never deny

Ticking a box grants that action; leaving it unticked just means “not granted” (it is never an active denial). That’s what makes belonging to more than one group safe.

Users, groups, and overrides

On Settings → Manage Users, open a user to set their access:

1. Groups — assign the user to one or more groups. Their effective access is the union of everything those groups grant. (Every user needs at least one group — no group means no access.)
2. Overrides — the effective-permissions grid shows what the groups give them. Tick or untick an individual cell to make a per-user exception: unticking a granted action denies it for that person; ticking an ungranted one grants it. Overridden cells show an amber ring, and you can clear all overrides in one click.

This keeps roles simple: define broad groups, then handle the rare “this one person is different” case with an override instead of a whole new group.

The Administrator group

A built-in Administrator group grants everything and can’t be edited or deleted — assign it to your owners and managers. To delete any other group, first reassign anyone still in it (and the last administrator can’t be removed).

Where permissions are enforced

Every permission is checked in three places, so it can’t be bypassed by deep-linking or a hand-crafted form post:

1. UI — buttons, columns, and menu items hide.
2. Page load — the server refuses to send the data (and scrubs cost fields).
3. Action — the server refuses to write the change.

To set up a role

1. Settings → Permission Groups → + New (or Create default groups to seed Manager, Sales, and Back Office to tweak).
2. Name it and tick the actions in the matrix.
3. Settings → Manage Users, open a user, assign the group, and adjust overrides if needed.

Viewing your own access

Anyone can open their own user to see their groups and effective permissions read-only — so if something’s missing, you know to ask an administrator. Full administrators can also edit their own (handy for, say, hiding a feature you never use), and JewelTrak won’t let you remove the organization’s last administrator.

See also

• Adding Inventory Items — what staff need to view vs. create or edit
• Period Close — locked periods are an additional layer on top of role permissions