Tactile CRM has a simple permissions system for controlling access to the contacts in your account. But to understand how the permissions system works, you must first understand how the different types of record are related to each other. Organisations, People, Opportunities and Activities are the four basic types of record, and the following diagram expresses the relationships between them:

Record types further down the stack pictured above may belong to any combination of types above them. For example, you can specify that an Opportunity relates to a particular Person and Organisation, or just a particular Person. An Activity could relate to an Opportunity, a Person, and Organisation, all three, etc.

If you would like to control access (that is, who can look at a record and who can edit it) to your data in Tactile CRM, you will need to make use of the permissions system present on Organisations. By default, when you create a new record in Tactile CRM it will be visible by all users in your account, and editable by the same:

Let’s say you have a small team of sales staff, whom you’ve given access to Tactile CRM, but you wouldn’t want to give permission to change any of your contact data. To implement such a restriction, you can use the ‘Access Permissions’ controls present on the New/Edit Organisation forms:

To restrict who has permission to edit this Organisation, you would either select the ‘Just Me’ option from ‘Read & Write Access’, or the ‘Select Users…’ option, then choose appropriately. Similarly, by removing a User’s ‘Read Access’, they will no longer be able to view the record. Bear in mind when selecting permissions that a User with write access will be given read access also.

Organisations are the only record type you can specify permissions for in Tactile CRM, but all items related to an Organisation will inherit its permissions.

Tactile CRM has a couple of features for making the editing of permission settings easier. The first is the ‘Change Access Permissions’ control, present when selecting multiple records from an index page:

This will allow you to change the permissions for a large number of Organisations at once.

The other feature is the ‘Default Permissions’ set of controls, found on the ‘User Permissions’ section of the admin panel. Using this page, you can choose what the default permission settings are for each User in your account, and whether they are fixed or not. User with fixed permissions cannot change them.

This can be useful for keeping two groups of users separate from each other. For example, you may have multiple teams responsible for inputting contact data into Tactile CRM, but you would like to keep each group’s data separate. By setting up the default permissions so that each group’s default read permissions do not allow the other group access, all Organisations and related records will be shown only to their respective groups.