The importance of controlling user permissions

A routine financial review turned alarming when Mr. Ahmed, the accounting manager, discovered unauthorized changes to sales data by a team member who shouldn’t have had access privileges.

This breach resulted in inaccurate profit reports being submitted to management. The incident underscores the critical importance of properly managing employee access permissions.

Edara’s system offers a solution by enabling precise permission assignments, ensuring staff can only access information relevant to their roles, preventing accidental modifications and protecting sensitive data integrity.

Let’s explore how this works in more detail.

What Is Access Permission Management?

Access rights management strategically delegates authority across organizational levels, creating an optimal balance between control and innovation that drives performance.

There are two main management styles:

• Centralized Management, where authority is concentrated in the hands of a limited group of individuals who coordinate decisions across departments.
• Decentralized Management, where authority is distributed among various stakeholders, with regular oversight to ensure alignment.

The ultimate goal is achieving a structured equilibrium between these approaches by clearly defining decision-making authority throughout the business. For large organizations with complex management systems, this definition of access rights isn’t optional—it’s fundamental to ensuring seamless coordination and operations.

These permissions typically manifest as Administrative Rights (covering hiring, training, evaluation, and resource allocation decisions) and Operational Rights (governing daily task execution and cross-departmental coordination).

The importance of controlling users’ permissions

Distributing permissions helps you to:

Enhancing interdepartmental coordination

Proper access management clearly defines the roles of each user and department, allowing every team to focus on its specific tasks and responsibilities. This minimizes role overlap and improves overall efficiency across the organization.

Promoting Transparency

Access management also fosters transparency within the company. When roles and responsibilities are clearly defined at every managerial level, everyone knows who is accountable for which decisions — and the outcomes of those decisions.

This clarity ensures that each team member is responsible for their actions and decisions, whether to their team or to upper management.

Reducing the Burden on Top Management

Delegating access permissions within a company eases the load of daily administrative tasks on top management. This allows leadership to focus on strategic priorities — such as driving growth and achieving long-term business goals.

Improving Crisis Management

In times of crisis, quick and decisive action is essential. By distributing decision-making authority across departments, employees and managers are empowered to respond promptly without waiting for instructions from upper management. This minimizes delays and helps contain issues early, before they escalate.

How does “Edara” help you control authority?

“Edara” helps SMEs to clearly distribute roles and responsibilities, promoting transparency and ensuring that users are held accountable for their decisions, so that everyone in the company has limited powers based on their role and responsibilities.

“Edara” offers four types of permissions:

First: External Access Permission

In a corporate environment, external access permission refers to allowing an employee to log into the system. This access is typically controlled via Static IP configuration.

What Is a Static IP?

A Static IP is a fixed range of IP addresses with clearly defined start and end points. You can obtain one from your internet service provider for a separate monthly fee, in addition to your regular internet subscription. Unlike dynamic IPs, these addresses never change.

How Does a Static IP Restrict Access to the System?

Access is tied to the company’s Wi-Fi network. A Static IP ensures that only users connected to the internal corporate network can access the system — blocking any login attempts from outside this defined range.

In other words, employees cannot log into the application from home or any location outside the company premises. Even if they are physically in the office but connected to a different internet network (such as mobile data), access will be denied.

Access Exceptions

“Edara” gives you the flexibility to grant exceptions. Selected users can be authorized to access the system remotely — enabling them to work from anywhere when needed.

Second: Page Permissions

Page permissions define which system modules a user can access based on their specific role, ensuring they interact only with relevant areas. In “Edara”, these permissions connect to user accounts rather than IP addresses, allowing each user to log in from up to three devices simultaneously regardless of location.

Consider an accounting team with three members: while they could share identical access permissions due to similar responsibilities, creating individual user accounts provides superior accountability by tracking each person’s system activity. This approach enables precise identification of responsible parties when errors occur.

Managers typically receive expanded access privileges, including sensitive financial reports like income statements and balance sheets, maintaining appropriate oversight of critical company data.

For administrative efficiency, “Edara” enables user grouping by role or department, streamlining permission management by applying consistent access permissions across multiple users simultaneously without tedious individual configurations.

This structured approach balances operational efficiency with robust security protocols, ensuring both productivity and data protection.

Exclude a user from a group

You can create a group of users with the same permissions, and then make an exception for one member of that group. For example, you can give all members of the group access to the Warehouse module, except for one user.

This way, that user will be the only one who doesn’t see the Warehouses page options.

Determine who is responsible for key system settings

It’s important to identify a person responsible for key system settings, such as setting “master data”, “system settings”, etc. This could be the owner of the company, the CEO, the CFO, or anyone else who is constantly monitoring the workflow.

Access to these settings requires high and customized permissions, due to the sensitivity of the information and its impact on all users in the system.

Controls permissions

After the Accounting Officer logs into “Edara”, what they can do will depend on the permissions given to them within each page, they may be allowed to:

• Displaying only: Can see the information, but cannot edit it.
• Adding, editing, and deleting: They can add new invoices, modify existing invoices, or delete them.

This means that there is another dimension of control and security within page permissions, namely the “Controls” permissions that give each user a certain level of control within each page.

Therefore, page permissions protect the system from people accessing pages that are not within their purview, while tool permissions regulate the work within each page, determining who can modify the data and who can only view it.

User Reports

Within “Edara” there is also the “User Reports” option, which is an effective tool for managers to review the permissions granted to each employee, through this page, it is easy to see who has the permissions easily and quickly, making it easier to periodically check to ensure that the permissions match the current job roles, and review changes when needed.

Third: Data Permissions

Data permissions activate after page access, determining precisely what information users can view within each page. For example, a sales manager opening the Warehouse Stocks Report might see data from specific warehouses rather than all locations, based on their assigned permissions.

Similarly, accounting staff accessing the Account Ledger Report should view only relevant accounts—not sensitive information like complete capital history or decade-long profit figures.

This precision requires careful management by system administrators, ensuring users access only the data necessary for their organizational roles.

Fourth: Approval Permissions

Approvals are administrative actions that require final authorization to ensure the accuracy and security of operations within the company. These approvals typically include:

• Purchase Approvals.
• Sales Approvals.
• Warehouse Approvals.

Access to these permissions is strictly limited to specific individuals within the organization — such as managers or supervisors — as they require a high level of authority to maintain control and safeguard business processes.

Do System Settings Affect User Permissions?

Yes — system settings play a significant role in shaping user permissions within the platform. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate this:

1. Ignore Warehouse Permissions in Reports’ Setting

Let’s say a customer asks about a specific item that’s out of stock at a particular store. In such cases, the salesperson may need to check stock levels across all other warehouses or stores to determine product availability.

To support this, “Edara” allows you to enable a setting that overrides the user’s default warehouse permissions, giving them broader visibility for specific use cases — even if their standard access is restricted.

2. Report Date Range Restrictions

The system admin (owner) can define a custom date range for each user’s reporting access. This helps limit how far back users can go when viewing reports. For example, you might restrict an employee from accessing reports older than three months.

This feature enhances data governance, ensuring users only see relevant, up-to-date information and not historical data that may be outside their scope of work.

Conclusion

The controlling of authority in companies is one of the key elements for the success of any organization. The controlling of authority helps build a more productive and effective work environment by enhancing role clarity, increasing the speed of decision-making, and improving coordination between departments.

The correct controlling of authority within any company is not only an administrative procedure, it is an important element in achieving efficiency and security in the management of the company, which provides you with “Edara” with ease.