Learn how to set up role-based access, manage permissions, and maintain security with the User Profiles module.

On a construction project, the people who need data are spread across head office, five site offices, and a dozen phones in the field. A billing engineer needs BOQ rates. A site supervisor needs today's manpower plan. Neither should be able to open payroll. Access control is what keeps that boundary real once your team grows past the point where everyone knows everyone.

Why least privilege matters on site

Most contractors start with shared logins. One "admin" account gets passed around, and within a year nobody can say who changed a rate, who approved an indent, or who exported the salary sheet. That is not just untidy — it is the reason billing disputes become unwinnable. When a client questions a certified quantity, the answer has to be a record, not a recollection.

Least privilege means each person gets exactly the access their job needs, and nothing more. It reduces accidental damage, limits the blast radius of a leaked password, and — most usefully — makes the audit trail meaningful, because every action maps to a real named person.

What the Admin & Governance module provides

ProjectSathi handles access through a few connected pieces:

User profiles — a record per person, with the sites they are assigned to and the role they hold.
Roles and permissions — access defined at the module, site, and field level, so a supervisor on one site cannot read another site's data.
Access matrix — a single view of who can do what, rather than permissions scattered across individual accounts.
Approval workflows — multi-step approvals for the actions that carry money or legal weight.
Activity logs and login history — every change recorded with the user, timestamp, and the previous value.
Organisation policies — the defaults new accounts inherit, so a new joiner starts correctly configured.

Setting it up without creating friction

Start from job function, not from individuals. Define a role for each real job on your projects — site engineer, billing engineer, store keeper, project manager, finance, owner — and grant each one the minimum it needs. Assign people to roles rather than granting permissions one by one; otherwise you end up maintaining dozens of bespoke configurations.

Then review it on a schedule. Staff move between sites, contracts end, and people leave. An access list that nobody prunes slowly becomes a list of everyone who has ever worked for you.

The audit trail is the point

The reason to do any of this is not security theatre. It is that when a payment is queried months later, you can show precisely who recorded the measurement, who certified it, and when — with the previous values still on record. That is the difference between a claim you can defend and one you write off.