We launched the Idea Board about a month ago. In Admin > Ideas, there is a forum for clients to write, comment, and upvote feature ideas. If a client upvotes an idea, they will get email notifications as we post updates and ultimately launch the feature.
The response has been phenomenal. Over half of our clients have added or upvoted ideas in the first few weeks. We are honored to have such engaged clients and want to send a huge thank you. 🙏
Now, it’s on us! The board is tremendously clarifying: we have a prioritized list of what most clients care about. For example, we did not realize just how many clients wanted negative quantities on sales 😅—we’re now working on it!
Today, I want to write about one feature we saw quickly bubble up the list: customizable employee permissions.
Problem: Clients vary in what they let employees do.
We initially defined four roles that represented the employees at our first few clients:
Clerks checkout customers.
Managers manage inventory and pricing.
Admins manage credit limits and system-wide settings.
Owners handle the finances.
But we were wrong! We found that clients vary dramatically in the roles their employees play:
Some want no one seeing analytics to maintain privacy, and others want everyone seeing analytics to guide their actions.
Some want everyone changing prices to ensure they win sales, but others don’t want anyone changing prices to ensure margin consistency.
Some want to block a specific employee from doing returns.
And so on, and so on, and so on…
Given this variance, custom permissions quickly became a top item on the Idea Board.
Solution: Action-based permissions
Rather than defining more roles, we decided to change our perspective toward actions: what is each employee allowed to do?
We defined 21 actions in Rundoo, and we now allow owners to determine which of these actions each employee can do.
What next? Modify your permissions!
This went live for all clients this week. As a starting point, we mapped all users to a subset of these 21 actions based on whether they were a clerk, manager, admin, or owner. Now, you can go customize 😊
Have a great week 👋