Administration overview
What the Administration area is for, who uses it, and the ideas behind companies, users, roles, audit and apps.
What Administration is for
Administration is where the person who runs a2NSoft sets the system up and keeps it safe. Everything other modules rely on is decided here: which companies and branches exist, who can sign in, what each person may see and do, how documents are numbered, which apps are installed, and how the system protects its own history.
You open it from the application bar under Administration. Its menus are Settings, Users, Audit, Print & document designer, Masters, Dimensions, Configuration and Workspace.
Who uses it
- Company administrators manage users, roles, branches, masters and apps for their own company.
- The workspace owner (a superuser, or someone who administers every company) also sees the backup screen and can create new companies.
- Auditors with the audit permissions read alerts and evidence but change nothing else.
- Members and viewers normally see very little of this area. Most screens refuse changes unless you hold the matching permission.
Key ideas
Company. A legal entity. Every record belongs to one company, and a person only works in companies they are a member of. You switch the active company from the header.
Branch. A place of business inside a company. A branch can have its own warehouses, defaults and document numbering series.
System user. A login. An employee is not automatically a user; you link the two when you create the login. Users have a type (internal, portal, API and so on), a licence and a membership in each company: Viewer, Member or Administrator.
Role. A bundle of permissions named after a job, such as Accountant. Permissions decide what a person can do; the menu a person sees follows from them. a2NSoft ships standard roles that cannot be changed. You copy one and adjust the copy.
Data access. Besides roles, you can narrow which records a person reaches (their own, their team's, their branch's) and hide, mask or lock single fields.
Separation of duties. The system refuses to let one person do both halves of a sensitive job. Nobody approves their own work, and certain pairs of roles can be flagged as conflicting.
Audit trail. Every sensitive change is written to a trail that cannot be edited. You can seal it in signed batches, verify it, keep it for a set number of years and place legal holds.
Apps. Each area of the system (Sales, Purchasing, Finance and so on) is an app. You install apps per company, switch features on and off, and make fields hidden or required. Changes to an app's configuration need two people: one proposes, another approves.
How Administration connects to other modules
- Every other module reads the company, branch, user and permission settings from here.
- Masters (payment terms, payment methods, price lists) are chosen on customers, suppliers, sales orders and bills.
- Dimensions (cost centres, departments, projects, profit centres) are tagged on accounting postings.
- Sequences number documents in every module.
- Approvals is an engine that sales and purchase documents call before they are confirmed or posted.
- Email sending and WhatsApp connections are used by any module that sends messages, including Omnichannel.
Where to go next
Start with Getting started with Administration. Then use the guides for creating a system user and designing roles.