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Product Access Control (PAC) Help

Product Access Control (PAC) is an optional account feature which can control which products an account user can purchase online. It’s usually used in conjunction with the spend control functionality and is unavailable to non-account or anonymous customers.

Generally, PAC determines which products a customer can view or purchase online and can be implemented in a hard or soft version. With the hard implementation, users can view only those products which they have been allowed to see. Meanwhile, the soft version consists of three levels of product visibility:

  • P - purchasable (core)
  • A - approval required (non-core)
  • C - cannot purchase (excluded)

If a user orders a product that requires approval, and the spend control function is also enabled, a requisition is created which must be approved by a user with administrator rights. Each product can only fall into one of the above statuses at a time, and an administrator with the relevant permissions can control which status each product belongs to.

PAC lists can be applied uniformly across your whole organisation or differently at different levels. This is managed through the Product Access Control section from the My Account page.

Managing Lists

From here administrators can create new lists, edit and delete existing lists, and choose which level of the organisation a PAC list should be applied to (but each level can only have one list at a time). Other administration functions here include upload and download, and bulk-changes to organisation structure views.

When viewing a PAC List, you will see a Context label. This represents how the site as a whole should be treated for this account. For example, if the Context is set to purchasable, all products on the site can be purchased. Any products added to the PAC list are then deemed the exception to the rule stated in the Context.

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