Who can see what a part cost you

Role is what they do. Can see costs and pay is the one everyday switch for what they see.

For owner, manager · checked against the product on 2026-10-21

There are two separate settings behind every person in your shop, and mixing them up is the usual cause of somebody seeing a number you did not mean to show them. Their Role decides what they can do — write an estimate, take a payment, book the calendar. Can see costs and pay decides what they can see, and it is not part of the role.

Team has one everyday switch: Can see costs and pay. On gives the person every underlying money grant and off removes every one. If those grants are already mixed, Team says Custom and changes nothing merely because you opened the page. Follow Advanced permissions to review the mixed grants before deciding whether to replace them with all on or all off.

The rule, in one sentence

A money field is anything that shows what the shop pays or what the shop keeps. Cost, margin, pay rate, what a pay period costs, shop-wide sales. A price you quote a customer is not a money field, and neither is the total on their invoice — an advisor who cannot see a price cannot sell, and the customer is holding those numbers already.

The one carve-out is your own pay. Your hours and your own rate are always yours to see on Time, whether or not the switch is on for you. Nobody else's is on that screen.

What the one switch controls

What parts cost, and what they make: A part's cost, the margin on it, what the shelf is worth, the markup bands, and what a vendor charged on a purchase order. Off means those columns are not queried, not just not drawn.
What labour costs the shop: What punched time costs, and the labour half of a ticket's profit. Their own is always visible.
Pay rates and wages: What each person earns. Their own rate is always theirs to see, and setting a rate is a different key altogether.
The shop's own figures: Sales, average ticket, receivables, who sold what, and the figures the assistant is willing to quote. Off leaves Reports with its operational counts and withholds the money.
What the customer is charged: Prices and invoice totals. Everybody has this and there is no switch — see the rule above. It is listed on the card so you can see that it was decided rather than forgotten.

The split between the second and the third is the reason the whole thing exists. A pay rate is what a person earns; what punched time costs is what the shop pays to do the work. A foreman who has to know whether a job is under water needs the second and has no business with the first, and until these grants existed there was no way to say so.

What the grants cover

Seventeen places in the product ask the money question before they draw a figure, and each one names which of the four grants decides it. The main groups are listed here so the Team page can stay a roster rather than a permissions manual.

Parts — the Cost and Margin columns, the Total cost and Total value figures at the top of the shelf, and the Pricing matrix.
Parts › Purchase orders — what a vendor charged, on the list and on each order.
Time — pay rates and what a pay period costs, other than your own.
Reports — sales, average ticket, receivables, and what each person sold.
Settings › Labor rates — Show my cost and margin holds the cost-column switch and What an hour of labor costs this shop. The loaded labor-cost default is shown and editable only when the labor-cost grant is on. Without it, the card names the hidden figure and points to an owner instead of loading the stored cents into the page.
Assistant — the figures it will quote back to you.
The full export — the cost and rate columns inside the download.

On a repair order, the Profitability panel needs both the parts-cost grant and the labour-cost grant, so it appears only for somebody holding both. The order workspace draws nothing in its place when either permission is missing. What a job made explains what it shows and what it refuses to guess.

Most hidden figures are named rather than merely left out. A withheld column or tile explains that money visibility is off and points an owner to the team screen. The order workspace's Profitability fold is the deliberate exception: without both cost permissions it is absent. Elsewhere, a missing cost column can read as "this shop has no costs", which is a different and untrue thing, and it is how a permission setting gets reported as a bug. The full export says it in writing too: its README.txt names the columns it left out of your copy.

Turning it on for somebody

Step 1: Open Team
It is in the second column beside the rail, in the settings band. You need Add people and set their access to open it, which owners and managers hold.
Step 2: Find their row
Each person has their name, contact, status and role together. Beside the role, Can see costs and pay reads Always for an owner, On when they hold all four grants, Off when they hold none, and Custom when the grants are mixed. Custom is not rounded to On or Off.
Step 3: Choose on or off
Pressing Can see costs and pay deliberately writes all four grants: all on or all off. A Custom row has an Advanced permissions link where you can inspect the existing mix first. Following that link alone never flattens it.
Step 4: Confirm the switch
The role dropdown and the money switch save separately, so changing one does not quietly change the other. The confirmation spells out what changed.

For the figure-by-figure view, follow Advanced permissions from Team. The person-by-person section shows every underlying grant without pretending a mixed answer is a simple one.

An owner always sees money, so their row says Always. The switch cannot take away an owner's money access.

When it won't let you

You cannot switch money visibility on for somebody while it is off for you. The screen says so in words: You cannot switch on money visibility while you do not have it yourself. An owner can. You also cannot change the access of somebody whose role you could not appoint in the first place — a manager can appoint managers, advisors, technicians and front desk, but not owners and not accountants.

Every change is written down on the audit screen — newest first, who did it, and what it went from and to. Money changes get their own line, reading like turned money visibility on for and then the person's name.

The accountant case

An accountant holds Open reports but the money switch is off unless you turn it on. So they open Reports and get the counted operational cards, while the screen explains that its money cards and sales figures are withheld. That is usually not what you want for the person doing your books, and it is one switch away.

Where this stops

On purchase orders the parts-cost grant takes the writing as well as the reading

Everywhere else, turning money off only hides figures. On Parts › Purchase orders it also stops you working: a purchase-order line IS a vendor cost, so there is no version of that form without one, and somebody with money visibility off cannot add or correct a line at all. The screen says so rather than showing a form that refuses. What is withheld is the money and the writing of it — the Total column on the list, the Cost column and the order total on the order, and the Add a line, Save draft and the trash icon named for its line (“Remove [part] from draft”). Everything else stays open: they can press Start PO, open any order, read its parts, quantities and what has arrived, and press Receive as the boxes turn up, against the cost already on the order. Cancel purchase order stays open too, because stopping the quantities that have not arrived sets no figure. Both screens say the same thing in place of the figures rather than leaving a person to guess.

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