Common Use Cases for User Groups

We have now seen a couple of common use cases for user groups:

• A simple two-level hierarchy with admin users who can see everything and sales reps who can only see their own data.
• A three-level hierarchy with some regional sales managers who can see the customers of the sales reps they manage, but cannot see customers outside their region.

Both of these user group configurations involve restricting access to customers for your users, but not every company necessarily wants to do that.

Using user groups to indicate, but not restrict, customer ownership

Another common situation is that customers are allocated to specific reps, however, we don't want to hide customers from the reps that don't own them.

For example, if a certain rep is away sick or is not able to attend a particular show, we want other reps to be able to write orders for their customers. We want everyone to know who the customer belongs to, but we don't want to hide it away from other reps so that they can't actually see the customer.

To create this structure in Handshake, you should create user groups for each user, however, you leave all the users in the Master group so that they can still see everything:

Now, when your users are on their iPads or iPhones, even though they can see all customers in the system, it will be instantly clear who normally reps each customer:

This structure is also good if you have external reps who are not Handshake users, because you can create empty user groups for them without actually having to have a matching Handshake user.