Xero is becoming a really powerful tool for businesses, certainly well beyond just an accounting package. It's a great place to have your customer and supplier details such as addresses and phone numbers and can even integrate with Office365 and Gmail now. 

Employees can download payslips, apply for leave and even download PAYG Payment Summaries. 

But you don't want all of your employees to see everything in Xero either. So let's take a look at the different user roles you can setup and who they are best suited for :) 

Payroll Employee

This is the most basic of the user roles. All of your employees should at least be invited to Xero so they can view basic information. 

What can they see/do:

• Basic payroll information about themselves, ie salary, contact information
• Submit timesheets
• Submit Leave requests
• Download payslips
• Check Leave balances

It's really helpful if your employees apply for leave within Xero. They know how much leave they have accrued and you don't have to manually type this in before processing payroll. It also eliminates having to provide payslips and PAYG Payment Summaries when employees are going for loans etc! 

Invoice Only

This is a fantastic user role for people you just want to prepare quotes, invoices or enter bills but you don't want them to see your bank accounts or be able to run any reports. 

The good news is you can even lock the functionality of preparing invoices down into Draft only, Approve & Pay, Sales only and Purchases only. 

Xero obviously looks totally different for people who can Invoice only.

The helpful thing here is that the user has access to your contacts. This is great if you want to store phone numbers, email addresses and physical addresses in Xero as this information is available. One up to date database is excellent for #banadmin

The functionality differences between draft or just purchases is quite in-depth so best to take a look here for the details. 

Read Only

This user role is for the people you don't want to be able to do anything in Xero but that need to look at reports! Ideal for board members. 

Whilst this user can see bank accounts, who owes you money etc in your bills section they can't actually do anything other than look.

Standard

This is the role for those who spend most of the time 'doing' things in Xero. Ie reconciling the bank account, preparing quotes and invoices, entering bills, processing payroll and looking at the business performance. 

You can choose to allow a standard user to access reports (ie look at your budget variance or profit and loss) or you can choose no reports. 

Advisor

The advisor role is for the accountant and bookkeeper. We have this special role so we can prepare journals, run all the statutory reports we need and most importantly dive into where you can improve in business. 

Adding New Users in Xero from Xero on Vimeo.

Extra: Contact Bank Account Admin + Payroll Admin

There are 2 additional roles that can be attached to users in Xero. 

Payroll Admin allows the user to have full access to payroll. They can prepare and post pay runs, approve timesheets etc. You have to either be a standard or adviser user OR be an employee already setup to have Payroll Admin access. 

Batch payments are a brilliant way to ensure you aren't paying the wrong suppliers. Cyber crime is on the rise and it's really easy for people to direct you to pay another bank account that isn't your suppliers! Locking down bank account admin to ensure that no one updates bank accounts without approval is a fantastic way to help ensure you are paying the correct people.

It's really important that you ensure you aren't giving too much functionality to your team, but equally important to ensure you are utilising all the great features and functionality of Xero. 

We suggest taking a look at the users in your Xero file and ensuring they have the correct access and that you are adding anyone who is missing. 

To do this head on over to Settings > General Settings. Under Organisation select Users.