Announcing multiple user accounts
Product Updates • July 9, 2014 • Saurabh Nanda
It’s been long overdue, and it has probably been the most requested feature. Finally, it’s here! You can now create multiple users to access your Vacation Labs backoffice. No need to share a single username & password across the company. Everyone can get their own account and you (the account owner) can control who is allowed to do what.
Once you sign up for a Vacation Labs account you start off by being the “Super User”. This user is allowed to view, change, or delete everything from the backoffice. Absolutely no restrictions.
The Super User can then go on to create more backoffice users. Every backoffice user, starts off by being a “Basic user”, which allows them to view almost every section in the backoffice (only view, not change) — the dashboard, trips, bookings, coupons, etc.
Each user can be given specific permissions which define what the user is allowed to edit/change in the system. Here’s a small snippet of permissions:
- Allowed to create backoffice bookings
- Allowed to confirm underpaid bookings
- Allowed to edit trip content
- Allowed to edit trip addons
- …and many more
The permissions are very fine-grained, and they give you complete control over what a user can or cannot do. However it can get very tedious picking the right set of permissions to allow a user to perform their day-to-day tasks on the system.
That is why we’ve grouped permissions into “Roles” which correspond to designations (or responsibility areas) for most tour operators. You would normally assign Roles to a user, but can always specify exact permissions if you need to.
We’ve already defined a bunch of Roles, and in case you’re not happy with them, you can always assign a custom role and pick the exact set of permissions you’d like to give a user. Here are the roles we’ve come up with:
- Product Manager: Someone who is allowed to create new products (tours) & coupons and can change everything (operational dates, rates, content, etc.) related to them
- Content Manager: Is allowed to change content for any tour, but cannot create new tours & can not change rates.
- Reservation Staff: Can create new bookings from the backoffice system, but cannot give custom discounts, or apply special rates, or record offline payments.
- Reservation Manager: Can create new bookings from the backoffice and can modify any booking related field, which includes custom discounts and special rates. Can also over-ride capacity constraints for a tour (eg. overbook or underbook for a particular time slot)
- Finance Manager: Can view all reports, record offline payments, and issue refunds.
- Super User: Can do everything, including creating other users.
Every user has a Profile page which can be reached by clicking the profile pic in the top-right corner of the page.
Here’s what the profile page looks like. A user can change his name, password, and upload a profile picture from here. We also record all activity in the system which shows up in the user’s Activity Log.
Do give this a spin and let us know what you think in the comments below. We’re specifically looking for feedback around how Roles have been defined in the system. Do they work for you?
