Restricting payment options via User Group

[WylieE]

We are about to make some operational changes in the way our sales staff take orders. In short, they will start taking payment information (credit card and gift certificates only). We want to restrict the payment options available to our sales staff. Admin staff will have extra options as they deal with larger customers with net terms, etc...

I've used the 'Selected Groups' option in Payment Methods to restrict what options are available. This restricts sales staff if the place an order as if they were the customer. However, all payment methods are available to our sales staff if they go through Orders\Create Order. Is there a way to restrict the options available to our sales staff if they go through Orders\Create Order? This is the process they will follow most of the time.

AC version is 7.0.4. Sales reps are set up as Order Admins so they can see the entire order information. Admin staff are set up as Jr. Admins for greater access.

Thanks!

[AbleMods]

Only way to do it would be to customize the Admin-side checkout. For some reason the admin-side was never written to respect the payment method group assignments like the shopper-side does

[WylieE]

Thanks for the update Joe. If that's the case, I'm hoping access to the CommerceBuilder code is not necessary!

[AbleMods]

Thanks for the update Joe. If that's the case, I'm hoping access to the CommerceBuilder code is not necessary!

Have you looked at your group assignments for each payment method?

I looked at the admin-side create-order code. It's using the same technique to filter payment methods by user ID. This means the admin-side will filter based on group membership just like the shopper-side does.

But if your admin users are in any of the groups assigned to those payment methods, they're going to get them as choices. So adjust the security groups that are assigned to each payment method. Or create new groups and re-arrange the members so you get the combination you want.

[WylieE]

Yes, looked at those and that certainly helps during initial order entry.

If you go to an existing order, all of the payment methods are available under Record Payment. They also have the ability to edit existing payments. I've logged in as sales staff to confirm this.

It's unlikely our sales staff will edit existing payments or apply wire transfers, etc... but people can still have brain farts.... I'd like to minimize the risk.

[AbleMods]

If you go to an existing order, all of the payment methods are available under Record Payment. They also have the ability to edit existing payments.

Interesting, never thought about that until now.

I'll dig a little for you this weekend and see if I can find a simple solution.

[AbleMods]

Well I did find something of interest...

There is a subroutine in the Payments page that decides what menu choices appear for a particular payment record. So that's good from a programming standpoint, only one place to change to make things work the way you want.

But there's no logic to control the available choices by User. Thus as you said, anybody can do something payment-wise to an order after the order is in the system.

This could get complex quickly, So what if we could "restrict" the payment action choices to only the Jr. Admins? Nobody else could edit payment records or add new ones. Would that work in your situation?