Set Up User Access Level

User Personas: Admin | Project Manager

A user's access level controls which projects they can see. It is the coarsest of the controls available to you: it does not decide what a user can do once they are in a project, only which projects appear for them at all.

You have two choices. Give a user every project in the organization, or pick projects individually.

Use the links below to jump to a topic:

• What Controls What a User Can See
• Assign a User's Access Level
  • Organization Access
  • Projects Access
• Market Areas Are Separate
• Crew Members and Access Levels
• FAQ
  • Which access level should I use?
  • Will a user see projects created after I set them up?
  • A user has access but still cannot see a project.
  • Can I change a user's access level later?
• Permissions

What Controls What a User Can See

Three separate settings decide what a person finds when they sign in. They are easy to confuse, and picking the wrong one is the usual reason a user reports missing data.

Assign a User's Access Level

While creating or editing a User:

1. When creating a User, select Next: Assign Access Level. 
   • When editing an existing User, select the Access tab.
2. Select either Organization or Projects in the Access Level drop-down.
3. If you chose Projects, pick the projects as described below.
4. Select Save when finished.

Organization Access

The user can see every project in the organization, including projects created in future. You do not maintain a list.

While creating or editing a User:

1. Select Organization in the Access Level drop-down.
2. Select Save when finished.

Use Organization for administrators, executives, and anyone whose job spans the whole company. It is also the setting that stops you having to remember to add someone to every new job.

Projects Access

The user can only see the projects you enable them for. Use this when someone should be scoped to their own work.

While creating or editing a User:

1. Select Projects in the Access Level drop-down.
2. Use the toggles under the Access column to add or remove the user from individual projects in the list.
3. To give the user every project that currently exists, set Select All Projects to Yes.
4. To have the user added automatically to projects created later, set Add user to all new projects to Yes.
5. Select Save when finished.

Select All Projects and Add user to all new projects do different jobs.  Select All Projects - A one-time bulk action against your current and existing project list.  Add user to all new projects - A standing instruction for the future.  Setting the first does not do the second.

Market Areas Are Separate

Market areas are not an access level. They are their own field on the user, and a user can hold more than one, while a project carries at most one. Market areas then narrow what a user works with inside the projects their access level already allows.

The practical consequence is that granting a broad access level does not guarantee a user sees everything, because a market area assignment can still be filtering what reaches them. If someone reports missing data and their access level looks correct, market areas are the next thing to check.

See the Market Area Visibility: Who Sees What article for what market areas do and do not scope, and the Market Areas article for creating and assigning them.

Crew Members and Access Levels

Access levels apply to Users, meaning people who log in. A Crew Member who has been given login access has an access level like any other user, and you set it on the Access tab in the same way.

A Crew Member without login access is not assigned to projects through an access level. They are added to the work through the project team instead or Market Areas.

See the Create and Manage Users and Crew Members article for the difference between the two, and for how license types affect what a user can reach.

FAQ

Which access level should I use?

Use Organization when the person's job covers the whole company, such as an administrator, an owner, or an accountant. Use Projects when they should be scoped to their own jobs, such as a project manager or a superintendent running two of your twenty jobs.

Will a user see projects created after I set them up?

On Organization access, yes, automatically. On Projects access, only if you set Add user to all new projects to Yes. Otherwise you add them to each new project yourself.

A user has access but still cannot see a project.

Work through the three controls in order. Confirm the access level actually includes that project. Confirm their permissions allow them to view the thing they are looking for, since project access alone does not grant document access. Then check their market areas, because a market area assignment can filter data inside a project they can otherwise reach.

Can I change a user's access level later?

Yes. Edit the user, select the Access tab, and change it. Moving a user from Projects to Organization widens what they see immediately; moving the other way narrows it.

Permissions

Project level access is set on the user record, so managing it requires the permission that manages users.

See also: Set Up User Permissions, Permission Group Descriptions, and Account Administration: Guide.