Permission Granted: Adding New Reps and Setting Up Roles in Orion Connect

Orion Connect is a comprehensive platform that helps financial advisors efficiently operationalize your firm’s vision for success. But that doesn’t mean you want everyone in your firm to have access to every part of the system. 

Leveraging Orion Connect will help your firm grow and scale. And that means that your firm personnel will be growing, shifting, and changing as you onboard new employees and promote high achievers. 

When you first started using Orion, our team helped you add users, assign user roles, and set permissions. But you’re human and you’re busy. So you might not remember how to make additions and changes. 

So for this week’s Tech Tip, let’s take a step-by-step look at creating new users, assigning roles, and managing permissions in Orion Connect.

Creating New Reps

There are four steps and three apps — Firm Profile, Portfolio Audit, and Manage Users — you will use when it comes to creating a Representative in Orion Connect.
Users on the Representative, or rep, level need to be created in the Firm Profile App first, as the information you enter there will pull their credentials into the Manage Users and the Portfolio Audit App when you are assigning the rep to their book of business.

Adding a Rep

To create a rep, you will go to the Representative section on the left-hand side > Actions on the right-hand side> New Representative. Fill out the required information and select Save.

Orion’s best practice is to fill out all the fields listed above — first name, last name, full name, broker/dealer, and rep number. The rep number can be whatever you would like as long as it makes sense to you. Some Advisors use just letters, just numbers, or a mixture of the two. 

You also have the ability to upload a rep logo if that is something your firm utilizes. To add it, you will go to image and upload it there and it will show on reports.

Joint Reps

Also within Firm Profile, you have the ability to create a joint rep. This is where two reps share a client and they both can see that household’s information as long as they are assigned and a profile has been added. 

To set that up, you would create the rep like normal, but for the first name you could put “Todd,” “John” for the last name, and “Joint Rep” for the full name. You would then assign that joint rep account to the specific household they will be overseeing. You then add that joint profile to both Todd and John’s Manage Users profiles as well.

Assigning Book of Business

Within the Portfolio Audit App at the Household level, you will assign reps to the households they will be managing. 

To assign a rep to their various accounts, you will launch the Portfolio Audit App > find the correct Household > right click to edit > General section > locate “Representative” on the right side > type in the name of the rep as it shows in Firm Profile.

To assign a rep to all of their Households en masse, you would: Navigate to the Household Level in Portfolio Audit > use the Control key (highlight consecutive line items) or Shift key (to highlight various line items) > right click > “Edit Households” > Field Category will say “Portfolio” > then select “Representative” in the Field to Update section > add change.

Creating Login Credentials

Even though you have created a rep in Firm Profile, you need to also create them in Manage Users in order to give them login credentials.

Adding a Credential

In order to create a Representative’s login credentials, go to the Manage Users App and go to the Representative level > actions and select “New User.” You will then enter the name or rep number that you used when you were creating this rep in Firm Profile. Best practice is to fill out the user ID, first and last name, and email. You will then click on the “profiles” option and select the role you would like the user to have.

Using Profiles

You would need to add a profile if you want a rep to share their book of business with a manager or in the case of joint reps. For joint reps, you will add a profile for both reps.

For one-way sharing or joint reps, once you add the profile that user will have access to the other users client list. 

You do not need to add profiles to Advisor level users since they can see everything within your database.

Sending Passwords

Select “save” and choose if you want the temporary password shown to you or have an email sent to the user to notify that their login credentials have been created. 

Note that there are time limits set for either creating a new user or resetting a user. The email link for a new user will expire in 24 hours and 15 minutes for resetting a user. Should the email expire before a user logs into their account, have them go to the login page, enter their username and click on the “forgot password” link.

There are also parameters for database password expirations. The default for all users are:

• Password expiration = 90 days
• Account deactivation = 90 days
• Account deletion = 180 days

If you would like this changed to a specified timeframe such as 365 days or never, contact Platform Support and we can submit a quick project to our programmers to get that changed.

Assigning User Roles

Firm Relationships set user roles and what they have access to and determine what rights that user has to edit and delete various information. You will create the relationships in the Firm Profile App, but then will navigate to the Manage User App to allow access or login on an individual user basis.

Four Levels of Users

There are four levels of users within Orion Connect. The first level is “Advisor,” which is the largest because they have the ability to see everything in your database and can see all the accounts. 

Broker/Dealers and Representatives are similar in the fact that they both are limited in their visibility of certain features throughout Orion and can only see things pertaining to their book of business that they have been assigned to.

Clients are the smallest level because the can only see their account within the Client Portal.

Advisor vs. Representative

One of the biggest questions we often get about firm relationships is about what it means to be an Advisor versus a Representative, so let’s address the three areas of differences:

• Household Access: Advisors can have access to and view all of the Households within your database regardless of if they are assigned to that household, whereas reps can only view and/or edit the book of business they are assigned to. 
• Support Questions: Advisor-level users can call into Orion for assistance with database-specific questions as long as they are listed as an authorized contact, while reps cannot contact us directly because then they would have access to all accounts or households.
• System-Wide Changes: Advisors also have the ability to make global changes within the different apps, depending on the role and/or permissions they are assigned. 

Creating and Editing a Role

You can create a new role from scratch, but you also can clone an existing role (like the ones above) to save time. For example, if you were creating a role for billing purposes, you can only enable the rights that applied to billing or another specific job task that you are cloning the role for and call it “Rep with Billing.”

This is where you can edit roles as well. When looking at the list of permissions, the apps section refers to the apps that the user will see in Orion Connect. The records and actions sections control what the user can and cannot do such as view, edit, and delete.

After you make changes to a user or role you may have to refresh your browser to see the updates. Also note that any changes you make to a role will affect everyone else who is also assigned to that role.

Viewing Permissions

If you simply want to see what permissions are set for each user role, go to Manage Users > go to the appropriate user level (Advisor or Representative) > find the user’s name > right click > edit > profiles on the left hand side and then click the blue “view” button.

Communicating Permissions

Lastly, make sure you collaborate with your team to set up the right permissions and roles for your firm and then share with your team what the different roles have access to so they know what they are allowed to do.

In the past, we have had an Advisor call into Orion Support on different occasions very frustrated because we would walk him through how to do a process only to have him be unable to complete the necessary steps due to the limits on his permissions.

 

Want more help with creating new users and setting up roles and permissions for your firm? Contact our Platform Support Team through the in-platform chat or by emailing platformsupport@orion.com.

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