Rights in Vtiger CRM

Setting up permissions in Vtiger CRM can be complicated. Vtiger CRM offers extensive possibilities. Especially when you start using Vtiger CRM for the first time, you may wonder where to start. In this blog, we'll show you how to tackle this.

Basics

• Each record (an organization, a sales opportunity, a calendar appointment etc) in Vtiger CRM has a user responsible for it, a Vtiger CRM user.
• Every user in Vtiger CRM has a role. A person's role has to do with the purpose, the reason this person is using Vtiger CRM. Roles have a hierarchical component, meaning that they define whether someone has people above or below them to answer to. Vtiger CRM wants to know this because it allows for example
  • the manager can shift responsibility for a record to someone else on his team, but not vice versa.
  • the marketing manager plus anyone below that may view a report. Then if a role is added later under the marketing manager, it doesn't have to be customized per report.
• A role is associated with one or more profiles. A profile is full of checkboxes and sliders to indicate what is and is not allowed for all modules, fields and special actions.
• If a role is not entitled to a module according to one profile, but is entitled to a module according to the other (which is also associated with the role), then the user with that role will be granted access to that module.
• In addition to normal rights, there are 'admin' rights. Someone with admin rights can change all settings of Vtiger CRM, no matter what role they have.

Why are roles and profiles separate in Vtiger CRM?

If you didn't, you had to fill in a lot of the same stuff for each role. For example, the sales manager uses the same modules as the inside sales staff and the account managers (underlying roles). Now you can attach the same profile to the three roles and you don't have to put all those checkboxes and sliders for each role.

If you do want to give the sales manager an additional right, you can create an additional profile for him with only that right. You then add the additional profile to the sales manager role, on top of the profile he already has.

By the way, in Vtiger CRMyou can relate a profile directly to the role. We don't recommend doing this, precisely for the reasons mentioned above.

How do I address it?

If you are just starting out with Vtiger CRM, the following are good steps to take.

1. Make a list of everyone who is going to use vtiger
2. Bundle those users based on the purpose for which they will be using vtiger (sales, marketing, support). If it is the case that employees will be working in vtiger for multiple departments (i.e. goals), this will be a bit trickier. There are two possibilities: the person will have multiple logins to vtiger, or there will have to be combined roles (think of a Marketing-sales role). You can put the goals in a column after the persons name.
3. Add hierarchy: who is accountable to whom? Perhaps your team is not hierarchical, in which case you can omit this and your role assignment will be simpler. Put the (job) name of the person who is accountable to in the next column.
4. Now create a column for each module you plan to use in vtiger and then for each bundle of individuals with the same goal, tick which module they need to execute their goals in vtiger.
5. Now your overview is complete and you can get started in vtiger. First create profiles, then when creating the roles you can immediately add the correct profile(s). Vtiger already has a number of standard profiles you can (re)use. Name your profile after the purpose of the people you are creating it for and turn on the required modules in the profile and turn off the rest. To start with, leave the fields untouched, but turn off the special operations (import, export etc.).
6. Now you can create the roles. In vtiger the roles screen looks like an organization chart with 'Organization' at the top and 'CEO' below. Those two are standard and it is not advisable to remove them. Under CEO vtiger already provides some standard roles, you can (re)use them. Under Privileges choose 'Use privileges from existing profile' . Then you can relate your profiles to the role.
7. Now test whether the desired effect has been achieved: is Irma from sales now indeed entitled to the right modules and not to modules where she does not need to be?

Now you have a good basic standing with which you can easily implement additional requirements at a later stage.

Additional Opinions

It is advisable to keep a user with admin rights separate, that is, someone only logs in as a user with admin rights for the purpose of actually working with those settings.