Importance of Setting Employee Permissions
Take control of employee management with AutoFluent®’s tailor-made features. Creating AutoFluent® users and understanding their employee permissions is an important part of managing and securing your confidential data. Employee permissions dictate what tasks each employee login is able to perform - whether it be creating workorders, editing inventory, managing vendor bills, etc. If you pay your employees based on commission, AutoFluent® can also report how much each employee has earned in a certain period.
You can find the list of permissions by clicking the black Gear Icon from the homepage of AutoFluent® , and then click the Employees button on the right-hand side. Once inside the Employees window, you can create new employees by clicking New. To edit the permissions of each employee, select the employee from the list then check or uncheck the checkboxes in the lower half of the window. Please note the heading of each set of permissions in the list. This can be helpful in narrowing down a specific permission type. We recommend removing all three Deleting permissions from all employees because deleting anything with history will cause historical reporting issues.
Additionally, there are tools within the Employees window that can assist you in assigning permissions. For example, you can copy the entire permission list from one employee and apply it to a different employee. To do so, first select the employee you want to copy permissions from, then find and click the Copy Permissions button located toward the center of the Employees window. Next, select the employee you would like to give the same permissions to. Click the Paste Permissions button and click Save Changes afterwards. Additionally, you can use the Paste to All Stores button which is convenient for businesses with multiple locations. This button allows you to take the permissions of a single employee and apply them to all store locations, so that employee has the exact same permissions no matter which location they’re at. If you would like to edit an employee’s permission per location, you can select the location in the yellow drop-down menu on the center left-hand side. For example, you can allow them to log into one location, but not another.
To the right of the employee list, you will see the Active column. Unchecking the Active box will block an employee from being able to log into AutoFluent®, however it will save the work that the employee has done in the past for reporting purposes. This is the recommended way of “removing” employees as opposed to deleting the employee. It is only recommended to delete an employee with zero history within the software - for example an employee that you just created but need to delete due to a mistake.
To the left of the Active column you will see the Commission column. Once you click the Edit button in the Commission column, the Commission Settings window opens. From here you can choose to offer commissions based on sales or profit, in addition to basing your commissions on parts and/or labor. Another feature of commissions is the ability to choose a cutoff amount so you can customize and set goals for your employees. For example, you might like the employee to make 5% commission up until they have reached a certain goal, lets say $1000. Then, you can offer a 10% commission rate for sales above $1000 to incentivize higher sales. To achieve this, enter in your desired Commission % Before Cutoff field(s) - in this example, we will put 5% commission. Then set your cutoff amount by entering into the Sales/Profit Cutoff Amounts field(s) - we will input $1000 following our example. Now finally select your post cutoff commission amount by entering it into the Commission % After Cutoff field(s) - we will enter 10% here. The 2nd commission rate in the Commission Settings window is an additional commission rate which does not have a cutoff amount.
Employee Cost, found between the Active and Commission columns, allows you to input your employees hourly wage to be compared against profit on labor items. To view this feature from within a workorder, you can click the Profit Margin button along the bottom edge. You can also run an Invoice Profit Detail report which gives you your labor profit percent based on Labor hours vs employee wage as a percentage.
Don’t forget, you can always contact support to answer your questions about this, or for any assistance with AutoFluent® .