A counter is the part of a business where cash, stock and discretion meet, which is why the permissions here are cut finer than anywhere else in the product.
The eight permissions
| Permission | The right to |
|---|---|
| Sell | Ring up and settle. This and nothing else is what a cashier needs. |
| Sales | Change a sale afterwards — reprint, void, export. A different power from taking money. |
| Credit sales | Give stock away on a promise. |
| Refunds | Give money back. |
| Shifts | Open a drawer; with approve, close somebody else’s. |
| Terminals | Register a device that can take money. |
| Menu | Decide what reaches a counter screen. |
| Settings | Change how a shop behaves — the discount ceiling, rounding, receipts. |
Splitting Sell from Sales is the one worth understanding. Taking money at a counter and reaching back into a sale after the fact are genuinely different jobs, and a role that holds both has nobody checking it.
The three roles
| Cashier | Shift supervisor | Store manager | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ring up and settle | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| See past sales | Their own | Their team’s | The shop’s |
| Reprint a receipt | Their own | Their team’s | The shop’s |
| Void a sale | No | Yes | Yes |
| Refund | No | Yes | Yes, and approve |
| Sell on credit | No | No | Yes |
| Open a drawer | Their own | Yes | Yes |
| Close somebody else’s | No | Yes | Yes |
| Change the menu | No | No | Yes |
| Change shop settings | No | No | Yes |
| Register a till | No | No | No |
The last row is not an oversight. A store manager runs their shop — its sales, its menu, its staff, its stock — and cannot create a new device that takes money. That decision sits with head office, because a till is a till anywhere you carry it.
What a cashier gets besides
A cashier can see items and stock levels, and nothing else. That is enough to answer “have we got any left” at the counter, and not enough to change what anything costs.
A supervisor also gets stock transfers, which looks out of place until seven in the morning when the delivery arrives and the manager is not in yet. Somebody has to sign for it.
Restricted to nothing is not restricted
All three counter roles are segmented by shop: a person holding one sees the shops they are attached to and no others.
Which produces the trap. A segmented role attached to no shop is not restricted to nothing — it is restricted by nothing, and sees every shop. An empty list reads as “no restrictions”, not as “no access”.
The counter refuses to activate a person in that state rather than quietly handing them the whole chain. If somebody cannot be switched on, check which shops they are attached to before checking anything else — it is almost always this.
Starting from these
The three are starting points, not a cage. Copy one and change it: a supervisor who may sell on credit, a cashier trusted with refunds at a shop with two staff. What matters is deciding it, rather than arriving at it by giving somebody an extra permission every time something did not work.
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