How to restrict a user to one class, location or tracking category in QuickBooks or Xero

A branch manager should see their branch's numbers. A department head should see their department's spending. A project lead should see their project. Accounting systems tag transactions this way. In QuickBooks they are classes and locations; in Xero they are tracking categories. But user permissions rarely follow the same lines.

What QuickBooks Online offers

• Simple Start, Essentials and Plus: user roles control what kind of work someone can do (sales, expenses, reports), not which class or location they can see.
• Advanced: custom roles can restrict a user's sales transactions to specific locations, and limit which reports they can open. Intuit does not offer the same restriction for classes, for purchases and bills, or for specific accounts or customers.

So even on the top plan, "show my East Region manager only East Region spending" is not something QuickBooks Online does natively.

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise has Data Level Permissions for customer groups, but that is a different product.

What Xero offers

Xero's roles (Read only, Invoice only, Standard, Adviser) apply to the whole organisation. You cannot restrict a user to one tracking category. Users have asked Xero for this on its product ideas board since 2022, and at the time of writing it has not been delivered.

The usual workarounds, and their problems

• Filtered report exports: run a report filtered by class or tracking category and email it. It works, but has to be redone every month and is stale on arrival.
• Separate companies per branch: heavy, expensive, and it breaks consolidated reporting.
• Trust: give a full or read-only login and ask them to look only at their area. Fine until it isn't.

A better way: scope the view, not the login

Vizii reads your classes, locations and tracking categories from QuickBooks Online or Xero, and lets you invite someone to a read-only view scoped to exactly those options:

1. Connect QuickBooks Online or Xero through the official sign-in.
2. Invite the manager as a Viewer, and choose By Class or Location (QuickBooks) or By Tracking Category (Xero).
3. Pick their options, for example East Region, or Retail and West Region together. Combine dimensions to narrow further: Retail and West shows only records tagged with both.
4. Choose their views: Bills only, Sales only, or both.

The manager signs in with an email link and sees live totals, charts and transaction lists for their area only. Everything outside their scope, including other branches' totals, contacts and the balance sheet, stays hidden.

Tips for clean scoping

• Tag consistently. A scope can only be as good as the tagging. Untagged transactions can be shared deliberately as "No class" or "Uncategorised".
• Line-level tags count. If one bill is split across two classes, each manager sees only their line's amount.

FAQ

Will the manager see the company's total revenue? No. Totals, charts and lists are calculated only from records inside their scope.

Does the manager use up a QuickBooks or Xero user seat? No. They are a viewer in Vizii and never get a QuickBooks or Xero login.

What if we rename a class or tracking option? Access follows the option itself, not its name, so a rename does not change who can see what.