Managing Access to the Customer Portal: General Information

The MYOB Advanced Customer Portal is a site designed to give the users of your customers' organizations limited access to your MYOB Advanced instance. To control access to the Customer Portal, you assign these users roles: sets of access rights designed for users with similar responsibilities. These roles are assigned access rights to the appropriate system objects and functionality, so users can access only the information they need.

To ease the process of setting up roles, MYOB Advanced provides a set of predefined roles; you can make changes to any existing role, create your own role from the ground up (which we do not recommend), or copy an existing role and make changes to the copy. To give contacts in the customer's company the ability to access the Customer Portal instance, you can assign the predefined Portal User role (or a similar role that you create) to these contacts. When you create a user account associated with a contact, you assign the needed role to this user.

Also, by applying the default Portal User access rights, you can give administrative users in the customer's organization the access rights to add, delete, and manage user accounts for the contacts of their organization.

Learning Objectives

In this chapter, you will do the following:

  • Create a role for the Customer Portal users
  • Add a user account for a contact
  • Delegate user management to an administrative user of a customer's organization

Applicable Scenarios

You may need to create user roles, user types, and user accounts for the Customer Portal in the following cases:

  • You want to give access to the Customer Portal to your customers' companies.
  • You want users of your customers' companies to be able to create contact and user accounts on their own.

Portal User Role

MYOB Advanced provides a predefined role, Portal User, designed to be assigned to users that may have access to the Customer Portal. A user with this role assigned can sign in to the Customer Portal and review the information pertaining to the business account associated with the contact account of the user, including the following:

  • View and edit the company's contact information and address.
  • Add, delete, and manage the contacts within the organization.
  • View the contracts in the organization.
  • View and print documents, such as the statement history, the invoices, and the current balance and prepayment balance.

If you use the predefined Portal User role, you can change the default role settings by using the Access Rights by Role (SM201025) form of the MYOB Advanced instance or the Customer Portal, or you can create your own role for portal users by copying the Portal User role and modifying the access rights in the new role. For more information about creating a role for portal users, see Managing Access to the Customer Portal: To Create Roles for Employees of a Customer.

External User Types

In MYOB Advanced, user types provide default settings for new users that you create, including which entity type (an internal employee or an external contact) is associated with the user type and which roles can be associated with the user accounts to which the user type is assigned.

On the User Types (EP202500) form, each user type for portal users must have the contact entity type selected in the Linked Entity box of the Summary area and the Portal User role (or any other custom portal role that you might have created for portal users) listed on the Allowed Roles tab.

For more information, see User Access: Linked Entities and User Types.

User Accounts for Contacts

You can add a user account to a contact account in one of the following ways:

  • By using the Contacts (CR302000) form to open the contact for editing, and then adding the user account information on the User Info tab
  • By using the Users (SM201010) form to create a user account and linking it with the existing contact account

When you create a user account, you must select a contact-related user type and assign the user the Portal User role, or any other role created for the portal user. For details, see Managing Access to the Customer Portal: To Create a User Account for a Contact.