«Do I give this person a Team Member licence or a full one?» It's the question we get asked most on every Business Central project, because the answer affects a good chunk of the monthly bill. The problem is that «can view and approve» sounds fine on paper, but day to day it raises very specific doubts: can this role enter a delivery note? Can they approve holiday requests? Can they edit a customer record?

Here it is role by role, with real examples from the departments where most doubts come up: sales, HR, management and the warehouse.

The base rule, in one sentence

A Team Member licence can read, approve workflows and edit a handful of very specific fields (timesheets, expenses, the occasional master-data field). What it can never do is create or post documents: sales orders, purchase orders, invoices or ledger entries. That line isn't crossed by any configuration or extra permission: it's a limit of the licence type itself, not of the role you assign inside Business Central.

Department by department: what's in and what's out

Sales

  • Can: check a customer's history, see available stock, check an order's status, approve a discount that's been sent to them for sign-off.
  • Can't: create the sales order or the quote. If your salesperson invoices or creates orders themselves, they need a full licence (Essentials or Premium), not Team Member.

HR and payroll

  • Can: log their own hours or expenses, request and approve holiday, view an employee's history.
  • Can't: manage payroll accounting if that means posting entries or documents in the ERP (that's a full user).

Management

  • Can: view dashboards, financial and sales reports, approve expenses or orders above a set limit.
  • Can't: edit those reports or enter accounting transactions. For most management profiles this is exactly right: they view and approve, they don't operate.

Warehouse

  • Can: check locations and stock, confirm a picking task already created by someone else.
  • Can't: register goods in or out if that means creating the warehouse document. For shared shift-based roles, this is usually better solved with a Device licence than with Team Member, precisely because the operator does need to post movements.

The three mistakes we see most often

  • Giving Team Member to whoever invoices. It surfaces on day two, when the person can't finish their job and the licence has to be changed in a rush.
  • Assuming «approve» includes «edit». Approving a workflow (a purchase order, say) doesn't grant permission to edit that order's lines.
  • Thinking it's a «read-only» licence. It isn't: it allows specific actions (approving, logging hours/expenses, editing some fields), it just doesn't allow running the ERP day to day.

How to tell if a role fits Team Member

Ask just one question for each person: does their job ever require creating or posting a document in the ERP? (an order, an invoice, a ledger entry, a warehouse movement). If the answer is yes, even for a single task a month, they need a full licence. If the answer is no — they only view, approve or log hours/expenses — Team Member is more than enough, and you save real money.

Frequently asked questions

Can a Team Member edit a customer or item record?

They can edit a handful of very specific fields on master records that already exist — updating a contact's phone number or a shipping address, say — but they can't create new records or touch the fields that affect accounting, stock or pricing. The distinction matters day to day: if you need someone to onboard new customers, manage price lists or maintain the full item master, that person needs a full licence, not a Team Member. In practice, most companies give these limited permissions to customer service or admin profiles who only need to keep contact details current, not create or transform ERP records.

Can I move a Team Member user to a full licence later?

Without any problem, and it's something we do often. Since it's a monthly subscription, changing someone's licence type is an admin task, not a technical project: it's updated in the Microsoft 365 admin centre and the user gets the same access back, now with full-user permissions. It's common to start with few full licences to control costs in the first months of a project, and add more as people's roles change or the team grows. There's no penalty for doing it more than once either: if someone moves from Team Member to full and back again, the change applies just as fast each time.

Does Team Member work alongside Essentials and Premium?

Yes, with either plan, and it's the most common combination in practice: most companies have a small core of full users (Essentials or Premium, depending on whether they manufacture or provide field service) and a larger number of Team Member users around them. The rule about not mixing plans only applies to full users against each other — you can't have Essentials and Premium full users in the same environment at once — but Team Member and Device licences are independent of that rule and combine fine with either plan. We cover this in more detail in our article on which Business Central licence you need.

In summary

Team Member isn't a «stripped-down» licence of lesser quality: it's the right licence for anyone who reviews, approves or logs data without running the ERP day to day. The real savings on a Business Central project come from counting properly who needs which type, role by role, not from assuming it based on someone's job title.

If you'd like us to go through your team role by role and work out which licence fits each one, take a look at our Business Central implementation service or tell us how your team works and we'll size it up for you, no strings attached.