Permissions for financial reports

Access to financial reports can vary depending on your permissions. The ability to view, add, and edit financial reports is controlled by separate General Ledger permissions.

Working with financial reports involves multiple tasks: running reports, editing reports, drilling down into a report, and so on. Each of these can require a specific set of permissions, both for the General Ledger and for the Company.

Make sure that you have all of the necessary permissions when working with financial reports.

Reports are only visible if you have specific permission to the report or if the permissions are set to allow Everyone.

Run the Permissions and Roles report (for roles) or the Permissions report (for users) to see exactly what permissions a user or role has. See Finding user permissions to see what permissions have been set, based on whether your company is set up for Users or Roles.

Filtered views

Security is always a consideration when accessing financial reports. One thing you can do to increase security is to use the Filters tab to create filtered views for reports.

Two common filter views are Entity- and Department-filtered views. For example, to limit a particular user or users to only data relevant to their location, you cannot set the user permission for Location, only Entity. In this case, when you create the report you can include a filter for a specific location and assign only view permissions for the report.

For example, you can create a weekly cash balance report named "Weekly cash balance: Corporate" and filter it for the specific Corporate location. You can then assign access to a group limited to that location.

To ensure that only the desired data appears in the report, make sure that the users do not have Add or Edit permissions for reports (set in User or Role permissions) and that drill-down is restricted. Drill-down also respects the security permissions on the user filter.

For more, see Reports filtered by location, department, or other dimension

When considering permissions

Consider permissions part of the design element when creating reports. For increased security, managing permissions gives you control over:

• who can view financial reports
• who can edit and run financial reports
• how deeply they can drill down

Keep in mind that user permissions affect more than just reporting. Making changes to user permissions can have an impact throughout the Intacct company.

If you plan for users to make changes to data contained in the report, those users will need Add and Edit permissions. To allow users to run the report, they must also have Run permissions.

Suppose you create a financial report that can be used by different roles for different reasons. Some users only need the primary information, while others need to be able to drill down into individual transactions or supplier data.

For this, you can set permissions based on a user role or specific user that allows application-specific permissions, and another set of permissions that denies application-specific permissions but allows the user to see financial totals.

By keeping the design of the report in mind, you can set permissions at a desired granular level.

What user types can access reports?

Not all user types can access and drill down into financial reports.

• Business users with full or limited administrative access can drill down into financial reports
• Project users and Warehouse uses can drill down into reports in companies with Project or Warehouse (Inventory) subscriptions
• Employee users can view reports if they have report permissions, but might not be able to drill down into underlying data

General ledger permissions

When creating, viewing, and printing financial reports, the most common permissions needed are those in the General Ledger, because all financial reports are based on it. For example, you must have permissions to list and view journal entries, journals, accounts, and General Ledger reports. You might also need additional permissions to drill down into transactions.

You can also limit drill-down at the row level, based on configuration of the account.

All of these are defined in General Ledger permissions.

Application-specific permissions

Application-specific permissions are where you set permissions that let users who run the report drill down into specific data. Each application can require specific permissions unique to that application. Keep in mind that these permissions impacts the overall way a person can work within the system. Unless this is a report-only user, consider the impact that setting permissions will have.

In order to drill down you'll need List and View permissions for items contained in the report. For example, financial reports based on Accounts Payable can require specific permissions such as AP purchase invoices or Posted Payments.

To see the application-specific permissions list, go to Company > Admin > Roles or Users, then select the user or role and select View permissions and roles (for companies with Roles) or View permissions (for companies with individual user permissions).

Report permissions

Each application can require specific report permissions based on the application. For example, Accounts Payable can require permissions for the AP Ledger report, Supplier Aging report, and 1099 reports. Cash Management can require permissions for the Revaluation report, Cash balances, and Cheque register.

To see the report permissions for a user or role, go to Company > Admin > Roles or Users and select View permissions and roles (for companies with Roles) or View permissions (for companies with individual user permissions).