Workforce Planning access and database permissions

Understand how database permissions and restrictions protect sensitive information in a workforce plan.

Because workforce plans contain sensitive employee information, such as salaries and bonuses, it's important to understand how access is controlled at each stage: within the workforce plan, in the Workforce database, and in Budgets & Forecasts.

Workforce plan

Access to a workforce plan is set in the plan setup, where you add administrators. This is an all-or-nothing permission. Every administrator can view and edit all employee information in the plan.

Plan configuration tab of the plan setup, where you can add and remove administrators

Workforce plan where all employee information is available to view

Currently, there is no way to restrict an administrator to a subset of employees, dimensions, or fields Currently, you can't restrict an administrator's access to specific employees, dimensions, or fields within the plan, or provide view-only access. We expect this capability to be available in a future release.

Workforce database in Flex Modes

When you publish a workforce plan, Phocas creates or updates a stream in the Workforce database. Access to this database, which opens in Flex Modes, is managed using the standard Phocas database access and restriction settings.

See Manage a user's database access and restrictions.

The Workforce database doesn't exist until the first workforce plan is published. Therefore, you need to publish a plan before you can give users access to the database.

Database access and restrictions can currently be managed only from Administration > Users, not from Administration > Databases.

Planning tab in a Budgets & Forecasts workbook

If you bring workforce data into a budget via a Planning tab, access to that tab is controlled the same way as any other worksheet tab in Budgets & Forecasts: the budget owner or administrator can restrict a tab to selected users, and only those users will see it listed in their workbook.

Regardless of the tab-level permissions, the data will only be visible to users who have access to the Flex Modes database.

Protecting employee salary data

The most effective way to protect salary and benefit information is to limit who is an administrator in the Workforce Planning module. Because administration is all-or-nothing, every administrator has read and write access to every employee's full record. Keep this group as small as possible, limited to the people who genuinely need to set up and maintain the plan.

If someone needs to see salary data for a specific employee, department, or other dimension entity, but shouldn't have full administration access to the plan, give them access via Flex Modes instead, using the detailed database restrictions described above.

The Budgets & Forecasts module uses this same restriction model for workforce data as it does for any other database and tab type. If a user has access to the workforce database and to the Employee unique ID or Name field, they'll be able to bring that data into a budget workbook using a Planning tab or Reference tab. If they don't have access to the database or those fields, they won't be able to see the data.

Care is still required, even when these restrictions are in place. Sensitive information can still be exposed indirectly. For example, assigning workflow rows in certain ways or combining dimensions and attributes might allow users to infer information such as an employee's salary.