Intro

Over the last year or so we've heard some of our clients explain the need to restrict visibility of financial details within Accelo. This may be because they have part-time or contractor staff who shouldn't have access to their billable rates or project budgets. Or there might be considerable variations in charge-out rates between junior and senior staff, and it's preferable (as well as more professional) to obscure this from some - if not all - staff.

Answering to this, we've meticulously audited the view screens, dashboards, progressions, exports and settings in Accelo that mention rates, financial budgets, billable values.. (you get the picture) to ensure that if a user does not have financial visibility enabled, they won't be able to see or access these elements.

Setup

Financial visiblity is configured on a user-by-user basis. To modify the setting for a user, simply open the User List screen, and then click the edit icon against a user.

Under the User Access section you'll find the new Financial Visibility setting:

The default setting is for a user to "View Hours, Billable Rates and Financial Budgets" - since that is what all pre-existing users automatically had. So to hide all financial details from a user, select the "View Hours Only" option, and then Save the page.

Changes

There are too many changes to fully document in this post. However, to give you an idea, here are some key areas:

Projects

- financial budgets and usage are replaced by hourly budgets and usage
- Add/Edit Workflow options are disabled.
- Custom fields of type = currency are hidden.
- Approval and Invoice features are hidden.
- Components only show hours.
- Financial details are excluded from components and job exports
- Financial details are hidden from the dashboard

Issues

- Current rate and financial budget are hidden (only hours are shown)
- Add/Edit of budget and rate are hidden
- Approval and invoicing options are hidden
- Financial details are excluded from issue exports

Progressions

Any progression actions related to editing rates, budgets, approving time or invoicing will be either automatically skipped, or the user will be informed that they must skip this step as they do not have the permissions to see it.

Administration

Since there are already permissions controls in place for accessing the administration area, we have not added many extra restrictions. However, as a precaution:
- Users will be unable to view/access the rates configuration
- Users will be unable to view the billable rate for any user (including themselves) from the user profile view/edit screens.

Are there any exceptions?

Yes. The Contracts (Retainers) module is currently going through a re-design, so we've held back on hiding all the financial values in the current screens/features, since these will need to be updated in the not-too-distant future!