Controlling Employee Access Through Custom Forms in NetSuite

An important consideration for controls is the ability to limit user roles and access. As most NetSuite users know, each environment can be customized with unique roles that meet client needs. It is recommended for roles, permissions, and access to be managed by an administrator. Currently, if a custom role has the Employees and Employee Record permissions, a user can add or remove roles and/or access for a given employee. This document will showcase a way to prevent accounting users from granting or removing access to the system.

NetSuite does offer the ability to maintain controls over employee access, however, this feature is only available through the Advanced Employee Permissions feature. A prerequisite for enabling this is for the environment to have SuitePeople HR. Many environments do not have SuitePeople HR provisioned, so we’ll be focusing on a way to work around this limitation.

When a user is granted Edit access for the Employee Record permission, that user will have the ability to give access to new or existing employees. There is no specific permission that will restrict a user from providing access. One way to solve for this issue would to create a custom form where the Access tab is hidden, making this the preferred form for the selected custom roles.

In order to be able to do this, navigate to Customization > Forms > Entry Forms. Customize the Employee Form. Under the Subtabs tab, remove the checkbox for Access:

Then, navigate to the Roles subtab. Make this the preferred form for any role that you want to prevent users from being able to grant or remove access:

Additionally, you’ll want to either remove the Custom Form field or make the field inline to prevent the custom role from switching to the form that does have the Access subtab:

After these adjustments have been made to the employee record form, navigate to each custom role and make this the preferred form on the role. Navigate to Setup > User Roles > Manages Roles. Edit the desired roles and click on the Forms > Entity subtabs. Disable any employee forms that have the Access tab exposed, leaving only the custom form where the Access tab is hidden available to this role.

Now that these adjustments have been made, you’ve been able to work around the system limitation where there is no permission to restrict a user from providing access. If you’d like to learn more tips and tricks to help your business, please reach out to our team here at RSM!

Jack White

Jack White is a Supervisor NetSuite Technology Consultant at RSM US LLP.

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