Roles and permissions

Every person who works in SolaCount has one or more roles, and each role is a list of things it may do: view customers, create invoices, post payments, open reports and so on. This page explains the seven built-in SolaCount roles — including the Sales and Purchasing roles added in October 2026 — how roles combine, how an owner changes what a role may do, and what a person sees when something is not allowed. Read it before you give a new colleague access, or when someone says "I cannot see the Post button".

Where to find it

• Giving someone a role happens in your Solavel portal: Team (the whole team) or Current organization → Application Roles. Choose the person, tick SolaCount and pick one or more roles (see Team and Application roles). The person needs access to SolaCount and a role: access without a role, or a role without access, gives no permissions.
• Changing what a role may do is done inside SolaCount by an owner: Settings → Organizations, open the organization and use its roles editor, Role overrides (/settings/organizations/{id}/permissions/roles, page title Organization Permissions), for a role, or User overrides for one person. Only the owner can open these pages.
• What you may do yourself: look at which buttons and menu items you can see; anything you may not open is simply not shown.

The seven roles

The Sales and Purchasing roles are deliberately narrow and additive: they are meant to be given to people who prepare documents, while someone else with a wider role posts them, collects money and runs the books. They never include payments, posting, voiding, deleting or accounting.

What Sales and Purchasing can and cannot do

What each person actually sees follows from that:

• Sidebar and Quick Add show only the pages and actions the role allows. A Sales user sees Customers, Quotes, Sales Orders (if enabled), Invoices, Sales Receipts and Credit Notes; a Purchasing user sees Suppliers, Purchase Orders, Bills and Debit Notes. The top-bar Contacts directory needs both customer and supplier access, so neither role sees it.
• Dashboard. Both roles lack financial summaries, so their start page opens their first permitted list instead (invoices, bills, quotes or purchase orders), and Sales Overview sends a user without reports access to the invoice list.
• Reports. A Sales user can open the Customer Statement, AR Aging (summary and detail), Receivable Summary / Detail, Sales Summary and Sales by Customer, because they only need invoice access. They cannot open cost-and-margin reports (Sales by Item), Open Invoices, Customer Balance Summary, profit and loss, balance sheet or any other report. A Purchasing user sees the equivalent payables and purchase reports. See Customer statements and sales reports.
• Search shows only the record types the role may view, and exports require the list's view permission.
• Buttons. A draft invoice shows Edit, Send Email and Delete only if the role has them; Post to GL and Record a payment are absent for Sales. A sales receipt can be created but not posted, because posting a receipt also needs Post customer payments.

Worked example 1: Sales prepares, the accountant posts

Hiba is a sales rep with the Sales role. Rana is the company accountant with the Member (Accountant) role. Al Noor Trading LLC wants 10 office chairs at AED 750 + 5% VAT.

1. Hiba creates quote QT-0201 (AED 7,500 + 375 VAT = AED 7,875.00), sends it, and the customer accepts online. She cannot Approve Quote — the button is missing for her role.
2. Rana opens the quote, clicks Approve Quote. Hiba clicks Convert to Invoice (she may convert) and gets draft invoice INV-1301.
3. Hiba checks it and clicks Send Email. The draft is not posted: Post to GL is not shown to her.
4. Rana posts INV-1301:

5. When Al Noor pays, Rana (not Hiba) records the customer payment. Until step 4 nothing was posted, so none of Hiba's work touched the books.

Worked example 2: two roles at once

Omar handles both sales and purchasing in a small trading company, so he is given Sales and Purchasing. His permissions are the union of the two: he can create and edit draft invoices and bills, and sees both customers and suppliers. He still cannot post, pay or run financial reports. Roles can be combined in either order, and they can also be combined with Accountant or a custom role: a Sales user who is also an Accountant can post. If the owner later turns off a single permission for Omar personally in User overrides, that explicit denial wins over every role he holds.

How roles combine

• A person may hold several roles. SolaCount grants a permission if any of the roles grants it.
• An explicit user override that denies a permission is applied to every role: the person cannot do it, whatever their roles say. An override on one role only changes that role.
• Overrides belong to one organization; a change in one organization never leaks into another.
• Owners are not limited by roles or overrides.
• An organization can have its own copy of a role's permission list: owners fine-tune a role in Role overrides. A change marks the cell Overridden (a dot marks a default that was changed for this organization). Change a role's setting later and your overrides still win.
• New permissions added by Solavel are filled in for existing roles in a compatible way. For example, Reverse posted customer refunds starts out equal to Reverse customer payments until you set it separately.

Changing a role (owners)

1. Go to Settings → Organizations, open the organization and choose Role overrides (page title Organization Permissions; "Overrides apply on top of role defaults.").
2. Find the permission group (for example Sales or Refund receipts) and click the cell for the role: it flips between Allowed and Denied.
3. For one person, use User overrides instead; pick the person and flip the cell.

Typical changes: let the Sales role Post invoices in a small team that has no accountant; stop the Accountant creating quotes; allow the Manager to approve sales orders. Keep the principle of separate duties: the person who prepares a document and the person who posts it should be different where you can.

Existing organizations

New organizations get all seven roles. For organizations that existed before October 2026, Solavel adds the Sales and Purchasing roles once, on request of the operator, without changing any existing role, override or assignment; repeating the step does nothing. If you do not see the two roles in Application Roles or Role overrides, ask your Solavel contact to run the role update for your organization.

When something is not allowed

Tips and common problems

• A new colleague cannot open SolaCount at all. Check that SolaCount is switched on for them in the portal and that a role is chosen; both are needed.
• Sales rep says "I can't post". Correct by design; ask an accountant, or give the Sales role Post invoices in Role overrides if your team is small.
• A receipt will not post for a cashier. Posting a sales receipt needs both Post sales receipts and Post customer payments.
• The Contacts button is missing. It needs both customer and supplier view access.
• Why can the Purchasing role see item purchase cost but Sales cannot? Cost is a purchasing figure; the Sales role is never shown an item's purchase cost.
• I changed a role but one person still cannot do it. Open that person's User overrides: an explicit denial there wins over every role they hold.

Related

• Settings · Getting started · Team · Application roles
• Quotes · Sales orders · Invoices · Sales receipts · Credit notes · Refund receipts
• Workflow approvals · Sales changes since 5 October 2026