Exploring User roles

ExpensePlus is designed to streamline the financial process flow, remove duplication and improve efficiency.

It provides each team member, whether staff, volunteer or trustee, with their own personalised user access and permissions.

You can also give users access to approve expenses and view relevant drillable and up-to-date financial reports.

You can customize user access in 3 main ways

1. Assigning a user to a user role - a user role determines which modules a user with that role will have either 'standard' or 'view' access to. There are 6 default roles, but you can add as many additional roles as you wish. Further information about user roles can be found below. You can customise roles here.
2. Setting individual user permissions - this enables you to specify which funds and categories a user can access, and which type of purchases they can submit. This may be different to another user with the same user role. Find out more here about user permissions. User settings can be customised here.
3. Additional customisation options - there are also lots of other ways you can further customise user permissions. For example, rather than giving a user access to all petty cash or bank accounts, you can set this 'per account'. Find out more here about how you can customise ExpensePlus per module.

More information about user roles

By default, Expenseplus is set up using the following user roles. A simple definition is given for each:

Admin Team - Admin team members can perform basic administrative functions such as issuing invoices, recording bank deposits, entering purchases, and using petty cash. They can usually add other users but can't change any other system settings. They have no default visibility of financial reports (other than set for their specific user) and can't see donations or Gift Aid information. They have no delegated approval responsibility.

Finance Team (AKA Super User) - A Finance Team user has the 'All-Access pass' for ExpensePlus. The Finance Team user role can do anything and everything in ExpensePlus. This role should not be given to a user simply because they are in what you may describe as your 'finance team' within your organisation. Indeed we recommend you restrict the number of users who have Finance Team access to between 2 to 3 users. You can't customise the role permissions of this user role.

Budget Holder - This is a user profile with minimal access and functionality. By default it is identical to the User role (see below). It allows a user to submit purchases, and where their specific user has been made a primary or secondary approver they can approve purchase requests and view the relevant financial reports. It exists as a seperate default role to simple role of 'User' so that you can easily customise the role for people with budget approval permissions, allowing you to extend their responsibilities as a 'group' if needed.

User (recommended for most users) - This is the most commonly used role for basic users of ExpensePlus. The permissions by default are identical to the Budget Holder, submitting purchase requests only. (See above for guidance as to how to use this concurrently with the Budget Holder role.)

Independent Examiner or Auditor - This role provides full visibility of the data and workflow to your independent examiner or auditor for their audit purposes. They'll be able to 'see' everything they need but won't be able to change settings, manage donors or approve expenditure. The role permissions of this role cannot be customised.

Trustee - This role is designed to help trustees view and scrutinise a basic selection of financial reports without being able to change data in the system.

All the roles listed above (except for the 'Finance Team' and 'Auditor/Examiner' roles) can be customised.

Adding user roles

You can also add and customise your own roles using the 'Add role' button.

Here are some examples of other roles you might crete:

• Offering Counter - for entering bank deposits
• Invoicer - for someone generating room hire invoices as their sole involvement
• Super Trustee - for a member of your trustee team who also takes care of Gift Aid.

Within each role, you can specify whether users with that role have 'standard' or 'view only' access to each module / report.