View as user

Sometimes you need to know what someone else actually sees. A colleague says a button is missing, or you have just changed a role's permissions and want to check the result before telling anyone it is fixed.

Until now the only reliable way to answer that was to create a test account: set a password, log in as it in another browser, click around, then remember to delete it. Most people skip that, which is why this kind of problem is usually noticed by the person affected rather than by whoever changed the setting.

View as user answers it directly. You pick a colleague, and every page you open from that moment on is shown to you exactly as it is shown to them.

Who can use it

Administrators only. You will find it in Configuration → View as user.

Starting a preview

  1. Open Configuration → View as user.
  2. The page lists your active colleagues grouped by role — Sales Agent, Accountant, Warehouse Operator and so on. This is deliberate: the question is usually "what does someone with this role see?" rather than "what does this specific person see?", and any colleague in that role answers it.
  3. Press View as next to whoever you want to check.

You are taken to the dashboard, and the system now behaves as if that person were using it: their menu, their permissions, the records they are allowed to see, and only those.

While you are previewing

A coloured bar stays at the bottom of every page, naming the person you are viewing as, and a matching frame is drawn around the screen. You cannot mistake a preview for your own account, and you cannot scroll past the reminder.

The bar also shows how long is left before the preview ends by itself, and carries a Back to your account button.

Nothing can be changed

A preview is read-only. Saving, deleting, sending, approving — every action that would change something is refused by the system, not merely hidden from view. If you press something that would write, you get a short message saying so and nothing happens.

That is on purpose. A preview exists to answer a question, and an action taken during one would be recorded against your colleague rather than against you.

The refusal is enforced at the database itself, not by hiding buttons and not by a list of page names — so it holds even on an old page nobody remembered to check.

A few pages are unavailable

Some pages belong to the person, not to their role, and are not shown during a preview:

  • their profile and password,
  • two-factor authentication settings,
  • notification settings,
  • their API tokens,
  • tasks.

Everything else — the lists, the records, the reports, the menu — behaves exactly as it does for them.

Ending a preview

Press Back to your account in the bottom bar. You are returned to your own account immediately.

If you forget, the preview ends by itself after a set time (30 minutes by default). This matters: without it, an admin who walks away from their desk leaves the session logged in as somebody else.

You can change the timeout on the same page — anything between 5 and 120 minutes.

What is recorded

Starting and ending a preview are both written to the activity log, naming both people and how long it lasted.

Anything you do while previewing is also recorded against you, with the borrowed identity noted — for example "Admin Popescu (viewing as Ion Ionescu)". Your colleague is never shown as having done something they did not do.

Two smaller details, for the same reason:

  • your colleague's "last activity" is not updated while you look at their screen — they were not working, you were looking;
  • you cannot preview another administrator. An administrator already sees everything, so there would be nothing to learn; it would only let you read a colleague's screen.

You also cannot preview yourself, cannot start a second preview inside one, and cannot preview a deactivated account.

Good to know

  • The answer is genuine. This is not a simulation of permissions. The system really does serve the pages under that identity, so anything you see is exactly what your colleague sees.
  • On an error page (for example a mistyped address) the bar is not shown. Navigate anywhere else and it reappears.
  • Your colleague is not notified and is not interrupted. They can keep working normally.

Typical use

A project manager reports that they cannot mark a lead as Won.

Open Configuration → View as user, find them under their role, press View as, open the lead, and look. Either the button is missing — so it is a permission, and you now know which — or it is there, and the problem is something else. Press Back to your account and fix it. No test account, nothing to clean up.