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Read-only access
What somebody who can see everything and change nothing is for, and why it is safer than the alternative.
- Steps
- 4 · About 2 min
- Who can do this
- Owner · Manager · Accountant · Team member · Read only
A viewer can open registers, read documents, and look at reports. They cannot create, confirm, correct, or delete anything.
It sounds like a limited role, and it is the right answer more often than people expect.
Who it is for
Your external accountant. They need to read the journal, the statements and the VAT position. They rarely need to post — and when they do, it should be a conversation, not a quiet correction you find later.
A partner or investor. Somebody entitled to know how the business is doing, who has no business changing what it recorded.
Anyone still learning. A new person can spend a week reading the real registers without any possibility of damaging them. That is a better introduction than a training document, and it costs nothing.
Why it is safer than the alternative
The alternative is not "no access". The alternative, in practice, is that somebody borrows an account that can write — and every action they take is attributed to the person who lent it.
That is worse in two ways at once: the work is unattributable, and the person whose account was used owns every mistake in the activity trail. A viewer account costs nothing and removes the reason to share.
What a viewer still sees
Everything about the company they are in: registers, documents, balances, reports, and the trail of who did what. Read-only is not partial — it is total visibility with no ability to write.
That distinction is worth stating to whoever you are inviting, because a viewer who does not realise they can see everything tends to ask for more access than they need.
Where the boundary sits
Read-only is a role, and roles are per company. In a group, somebody can be a viewer in one entity and a manager in another; the two do not leak into each other.
It is also not the same as module gating. A module switched off is invisible to everyone including the owner; a viewer sees every module the company runs, and cannot act in any of them. Who can do what sets out the full ladder.
Give the narrowest role that lets somebody do their job, and widen it when they ask. It is a much easier conversation than narrowing one afterwards, and the invitation can be changed at any time.
Next, you might want to
- Who can do whatThe four levels of access, what each one really means, and why read-only is a wall rather than a hidden button.
- Invite a teammate and choose what they can doSend an expiring invitation link scoped to the companies and the level of access you choose.
- Read the activity trailSee who did what, when, across the whole company — the record that settles "who changed this?"