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Granular Access Control – Secure, Zero Trust Permissions
Control-C’s new security model introduces a level of granularity never seen before in managing access to your Xero financial data. Traditionally, giving an employee access to run an Aged Payables or Aged Receivables report meant exposing your entire financial landscape – including sensitive areas like your Profit & Loss, balance sheet, bank transactions, and even other employees’ bonus information. Xero’s native user roles are fairly broad (e.g. standard user or advisor roles grant wide access). Not anymore.

With Control-C’s Zero Trust-based security framework, you can now restrict access to just the specific data or reports your team members need – and nothing more. Want a staff member to run only the Aged Receivables report? You can grant that exact permission, without also giving away the rest of your accounting info. No more over-exposure or “all-or-nothing” access. For example, an accounts clerk can be set up to view and export customer invoices and aging reports, but cannot see the general ledger or payroll details. A junior bookkeeper could be limited to inputting bills and viewing the payables report, without any visibility of bank balances or management reports. You define roles at a fine-grained level – a stark contrast to Xero, where even a read-only user can see almost everything.

This precision access control is built from the ground up, aligning with modern Zero Trust security principles that assume no implicit trust – every access is explicitly granted and minimal. For accountants and compliance officers, this means better internal controls and cleaner audit trails. You can demonstrate that even within your organisation, sensitive financial data is only accessible on a strict need-to-know basis. For instance, an auditor or external accountant could be given a special “Auditor” role on Control-C: read-only access to relevant reports and the audit log, but nothing else. Meanwhile, your sales manager might have access to customer contact list backups (for business continuity) but not to any financials. These tailored permissions greatly reduce the risk of internal data leaks or unnecessary snooping.

For business owners, the benefit is peace of mind and professionalism. You no longer have to say, “I’ll give my assistant access to Xero, but I hope they don’t poke around the salaries or bank accounts.” Instead, you define their role on Control-C to exactly what they require (perhaps invoice creation and nothing else). It shows a commitment to confidentiality: employees see only what’s relevant to their job, which also reduces temptation and errors. And because the platform logs every access and download, you have a full audit trail of who viewed or exported data.

This Zero Trust security model is a unique selling point of Control-C’s platform. It effectively adds a new permission layer on top of Xero’s data, one that many businesses have long wished Xero itself had. By deploying it, you protect sensitive information by default while still empowering your team with the tools they need. The result is a more secure, compliant operation, where data access is precisely aligned with role and purpose – no more, no less.

If you would like to learn more visit Control-C.com or find us in the Xero App Store.

It seems like this issue has still not been addressed? Crazy to think that a large well-known accounting software like Xero still does not have the basic permissions options we need. Just at least add the ability for 'nvoice Only' users to approve their own invoices, it's super basic.

I second the suggestion of using a tick box for each type of permission. This would help small businesses customise their approval workflows for their business type. For example, create a role where a user can create drafts and submit them for approval and view all invoices in the system for managing AR but not be able to approve the invoices/email to clients.

My suggestion to have a tick box beside each permission role, it is because individual company have their own culture standard and workflow procedure process. The adviser can tick the tick box base on the individual company workflow process.
Thanks

More granular permissions would be very useful - e.g being able to combine ready only and sales invoice only permissions, so someone can see sales invoices, but not amend them, etc, is useful to organisations which distinguish between staff who they want making changes and staff they don't.

May 2024 and this is still not sorted. Any plans to fix this, Xero team? It would be greatly appreciated, currently any contractor with access to invoicing knows everyone else's income

I fully agree, we need an option where someone can raise sales invoices but not have access to other customer information

Xero - Isn't it pretty obvious? Anything would be better than access to pretty much EVERYTHING, as things have stood since Xero was invented.
Sorry to be rude, but you do understand accounting right? & GDPR yeah?
Let me help - Purchase ledger clerk needs access to supplier contacts, bill processing, supplier reports, aged creditor reports, bills reports, purchase day book reports, bill production, quotes, purchase orders, bank supplier payments, refunds, credit notes and .........
Purchase ledger clerk DOESN'T NEED and NOR SHOULD SHOULD HAVE ACCESS to staff pay & personal information, the director's dividends & tax information, the companies balance sheet, staff bonuses, HMRC arrears (or otherwise), investments, how much the company spent on the last client event, or the christmas party, or the computers, Joe's redundancy payment (oh, did I let the cat out of the bag or should I call it something else in Xero so no one knows, HMRC won't mind....)..........do you really need me to go on?......
Perhaps some one else could be kind enough to waste some of their time explaining what the sales ledger clerk needs. or what the treasurer or in house accountant needs - which surprisingly is where the 'access all areas' should sit.
A waterfall access level approach with a tickbox list (just like staff access in MY XERO - (miss that - it was good and clear)....I've seen this before, oh yes, in SAGE. Works a treat. Easy. Clear. Transparent.
I have to give some staff access to EVERYTHING and freeze out others which not only causes causes offence, but also inconvenience to those that have to be disrupted in their own work to provide reports to other staff.
If the current reporting structure/platform can't be changed, why not build a suite of smaller reporting modules - task or job role specific??
It's stunning that this FLOOR exists in the first place, and beyond belief that in more than 10 years, and despite GDPR, and many many requests in the old & new voting system, NOTHING, EVER, has changed in this regard, or other items I've voted for.....

these needs addressing asap, even on create draft only the staff member has access to a full customer list which highlights amounts they ow and amounts we ow suppliers