Your accounting system stores unlimited and invaluable information derived from your business transactions which many people in your organisation can contribute and utilise to make gainful business decisions. However, controlling access to sensitive information and avoiding information overload or fraudulent situations can pose major concerns for most businesses, which is why Herbst Computer Software has gone to great lengths to develop a robust and comprehensive user set up and security system in Herbst Insight. Employee user profiles can be as simple or as complex as your business dictates. You have the authority to decide who has access to what.

You may wish restrict access to certain transactions to key users. For instance, you may want Joe in the accounts department to be able to raise purchase orders, but not issue payment, whereas Mary in the accounts department should be allowed to issue payments, but not create purchase orders, thereby controlling and verifying all outgoing payments.

Also a salesperson or order entry clerk could be granted read & write access to customer and sales data, read only access to product data and no access at all to purchases or nominal ledger information and limited access to reports.

Of course management can be granted full access to all information they need across the system and the business to comply with their managerial positions and enable them to make informed decisions.

With Herbst Insight documents can be edited or deleted which is obviously extremely convenient if there is a document entry that needs to be modified, however, the right to edit or delete a document is very powerful so again these rights can be controlled by via the user profiles so that system control is maintained as required.

Herbst Insight also boasts a unique grid view system, which presents the data in a familiar spreadsheet format with flexible sorting, filtering and analysis capabilities. User specific views can be created if management wish to restrict users from accessing key data or conversely to ensure that users have all the data they need to perform their job tasks properly. Users can subsequently modify and personalise their own views if granted appropriate authority.

Any reports created can be assigned a user privilege level, permitting any users with that user privilege level or greater to access them or alternatively block access if their privilege level is insufficient.

Herbst Insight also has a fencing mechanism worth exploring. At the end of a year or financial period a lot of reports are created and the information from which they are derived should not be modified unless exceptional. By defining a document fence date accident changes can be prevented as the system will prevent the editing of any documents created prior to this date. It also means that no new documents can be created with a working or post date prior to the specified fence date.

It is also possible to block the creation of document relations before a particular fence date, which may impact aged analysis reports, statements and period closing. For instance if you were to set a document relations fence date of '01 September 2001' this would prevent you from converting a sales invoice created prior to this date into a sales invoice credit note.

With the security log and user activity tracking functionality management can monitor and control any data changes made, who they were made by and when.

Whatever your employee structure Herbst Insight user set up is extremely flexible and can be configured to match your needs.