Friday Feature – Task Permissions

As the mother of a teenage son, I let him borrow my car but not reprogram the radio stations. (You know what I mean.) Well, Escape Online has a similar concept.
For example, hundreds and hundreds of users have the ability to create, edit, and submit vendor requisitions when there is enough money in the budget to cover the total amount of the requisition.  That seems reasonable.  But, there are also a handful of power users that should be able to override this budget constraint.  How do you handle that?

The answer is through the miraculous feature called Task Permissions. They are controlled through the User record. On the Finance side, the most popular task-permissions given are for “overriding budget” and “bypassing approvals.”  On the HR/Payroll side, the most popular is giving the ability to generate test retirement files.

Let’s take a peek at a couple of lines in the Activity Permissions tab in the User record, where you can define access to activities and/or the tasks associated with those activities.

Using lookups, I can select the activity, and then the permission.  I assign an edit or read role and then “allow” it.

Reading from the top of this screen shot, the first line deals with the Checks activity.  This permission will be for the whole activity. We know this because the Activity Task is blank. Notice how the Edit Role is also blank, but the Read Role is specified. This means that this user will have read-only access.

The next two lines define tasks for the Vendor Requisitions activity. They give permission to override approvals and budget. They have an edit role defined because these tasks will edit or affect the record.

These permissions mean that when my selected power user goes to the Vendor Requisition activity, those tasks will be available on their Task menu.

Remarkable! If only I could use this on my car radio.