Custom Roles in QuickBooks Online Advanced: Setup and Limits

QuickBooks Online Advanced ships with a permission system that reaches well beyond the standard user types. Its custom roles let a business decide, area by area, who may see and do what. Intuit pairs the feature with useful starting points and a few sharp edges, and we cover both here.

Three starting points for a new role

You never have to begin with a blank page. A role can be built from scratch, with access chosen area by area. You can start from a predefined custom role, such as Sales Manager or Expenses Manager. Or you can fall back on a standard QuickBooks role, like Company Administrator or the option with full access.

The areas under your control include banking, sales, payroll, expenses, reports, budgets, and inventory. That spread is the point of the exercise. A warehouse lead may need inventory and nothing else, while a bookkeeper may need banking and expenses but never payroll.

Building a role from scratch

The whole path sits inside one screen:

Open Settings and choose Manage users.
Select the Roles tab, then Add role.
Enter a role name and a role description.
Pick the areas of the product the role can reach.
Select Save role.

Give the description field a real sentence. In six months nobody will remember what a clever role name meant to cover, and the description is where that memory lives.

Some entries on this screen will refuse to toggle. These read-only fields are included automatically, and they exist for your information rather than your configuration. You cannot switch them off, so shape the role around them.

Sales permissions scoped by location

Companies trading from more than one site get a useful twist. A role can carry different sales access per location, so staff handle only the transactions that belong to their own branch. One prerequisite applies: the location must already be set up and added to your company first.

From there, the steps stay familiar:

Open Settings and choose Manage users.
Select the Roles tab, then Add role.
Enter a role name and a role description.
Select Sales.
Open the All locations dropdown and pick one or more locations.
Choose the access the user should have.
Select Save role.

Assigning a role to a new user

Roles sit idle until someone holds them. New people are added from the Users tab of the same screen:

Select the Users tab, then Add user.
Enter the person’s first name, last name, and email address.
Open the Assign roles dropdown and choose the role.
Review the permissions the role carries.
Select Send invite.

An invitation goes out by email, and the recipient must accept it before signing in. A forgotten password is no obstacle, since invitees can reset their own. Check the address twice, because a typo means a silent no-show.

The review step deserves a pause. It is your last look at what the role grants before the invitation leaves, and the cheapest moment to spot a permission you never meant to hand out.

Do custom roles replace the standard user types?

No, and the distinction is worth holding onto. The standard roles, Company Administrator among them, remain on the menu. Predefined custom roles such as Sales Manager and Expenses Manager sit alongside them as faster starting points for jobs the old types never described well.

Limits to keep in mind

Granular control has a boundary. The separate view, create, edit, and delete rights apply only in selected areas, and Intuit describes that as the current state of play rather than a fixed design. Elsewhere the options run coarser.

Read-only fields are the second limit. They ride along with every role automatically, and there is no way to strip them out.

Custom roles are also an Advanced-plan capability, which is worth knowing before you go hunting for the Roles tab on another tier.

A sensible first rollout

Start small if the feature is new to your team. Two or three roles, mapped to the jobs that actually exist, will teach you more than twenty invented overnight. Predefined roles make good templates for the first pass, since someone else has already thought through the access.

Everything above happens inside the Manage users screen, with no support case needed along the way. We will keep watching whether the granular rights spread to more areas, because that gap is the one most likely to bite a growing finance team.