An unusual request from a customer using Sage 50. They want to add users who can view certain data (customers, suppliers, sales orders) but not make changes.

With applications I’ve written myself I could do this many ways, with some applications that let you edit the data-entry screens you could hide the Save button. No such feature within Sage so it’s down to giving them options.

1. Within Settings/Access Rights, only give the user access to menu options that are read-only, particularly Reports – so they can view, save or print customers details, orders, etc.

2. Use a third party program such as MS Access to create view screens. Pretty easy to do and can even be done with ODBC if you’re not a Developer – I’ve quoted them for it.

3. Third party add-ons such as those from Adept Software do roughly what they want. They are looking at the trial versions.