Members, Roles and permissions
Pippin ships Owner, Staff and CPA, and you can write your own — a bookkeeper who enters Bills but never touches the Chart of Accounts.
Before you start
A Role is a named set of permissions, and an Org can write as many as it likes. Roles are not a hierarchy — CPA is not “more than” Staff. It can write the adjusting entries at close, which Staff cannot; Staff can raise an Invoice, which CPA cannot.
Three Roles ship with every Org:
| Role | What it grants |
|---|---|
| Owner | Everything, including people and Roles. Cannot be renamed, edited or deleted. |
| Staff | Day-to-day work — Clients, Invoices, Payments, Bills, Expenses, Time, Services, Banking, Journal Entries, sales tax. |
| CPA | Read the books, and write the adjusting entries at close. Nothing else. |
Permissions are deliberately coarse — one per area of work, not one per button. Deciding whether the bookkeeper can touch Bills is one decision, and nine checkboxes for it would be a worse question rather than a more precise one.
Reading the books is itself a permission. An Org may want Staff raising Invoices without seeing the profit and loss, so neither Reports nor the Ledger is granted until you grant it.
Steps
- Open Settings › Team to see everyone who can sign in, and what their Role allows.
- Choose Invite, enter the email address, and pick the Role. An invitation is sent to that address.
- To change somebody’s Role, pick a different one on their row. It takes effect on their next request.
- To write a Role of your own, open Settings › Roles and choose New role. Name it, then tick the permissions it should carry.
- Permissions are grouped as Day-to-day, The books, and Administration. Read each description — they are written for whoever is building the Role.
Good to know
An email address cannot sign in until an Owner has invited it. A stranger who finds your Pippin address and types their own email is turned away rather than quietly given an Org of their own.
Granting Export hands somebody a complete copy of the business, in files, somewhere Pippin cannot see. It is worth keeping to Owners.
Granting Audit is worth considering for an outside accountant — it shows who did what, without making them an Owner.