Hiring your first bit of help is a milestone. The season gets busy, a family member starts covering the stand on Saturdays, a bookkeeper offers to tidy up the numbers — and suddenly you're asking a question you never had to ask when it was just you: what, exactly, should this person be able to touch?
Most point-of-sale advice answers a narrower version of that question. It assumes a staffed register — one cashier, standing there, logged in — and tells you how to stop that cashier from giving themselves a discount. That's useful if you run a café with three servers. It misses the mark for a self-serve stand, a market stall, or an unattended fridge, where the till on the counter is used mostly by customers, and the person you hired touches it only now and then.
For that setup there are really two different questions, and they're answered in two different places:
- Can a stranger at my self-serve counter change a price, open settings, or poke around? (Answered on the counter, with a PIN.)
- What can the person I actually hired see and change when they log in to run the business? (Answered in the back office, with a role.)
Get those two straight and "giving someone access" stops being scary. Here's how each one works.
The counter: locked down by default, a PIN for the rest
A TallyTill till is a self-serve checkout first. On the sale screen a shopper rings themselves up — they scan a barcode, or snap a photo and AI identifies the item (catalog search is the fallback) — and pay by card, tap, or a QR code. That's all the screen offers. There is no "manager" button sitting in the corner for a curious customer to wander into.
The handful of actions that aren't for customers are gated behind a PIN, and there are two levels:
- An Admin PIN unlocks the admin and settings pages on the device.
- A Manager PIN clears the things that happen mid-sale: applying a discount or a price override at the counter, or pushing through a payment the till refused (like the balance on a CSA pickup). It keeps its own separate lockout count.
The Admin PIN also answers a manager prompt — an owner shouldn't have to carry two codes. And if someone fat-fingers the PIN too many times, that action locks with a message you write yourself, so a bored shopper can't guess their way into your prices.
One honest point, because it changes how you think about it: the till is one shared device, not a row of personal logins. Whoever is standing at the counter — you, your Saturday helper, a customer — uses the same screen, and the PIN is a shared code, not a per-person password. That's the right model for a tablet bolted to a stand. It's also why individual accountability doesn't live on the counter. It lives in the back office, which is the other half of this.
The back office: a login and a role for each person
Everything that runs the business — the catalog, customers, orders, payouts, settings, the team — happens in the Portal, in a browser, not on the customer-facing till. That's deliberate: admin work never belongs on the counter. And the Portal is where each person on your team gets their own sign-in, so you're never handing out one shared password.
What they can do is set by their role. There are four, and you hand out three of them (the owner seat is yours and isn't assignable):
| Role | The person it fits | What they can do | What they can't |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owner | You | Everything, including closing the account. One per business. | — |
| Admin | A partner or manager you trust fully | Run the business: settings, payment setup, billing, devices, and the team | Delete the account |
| Staff | The person who works the stand or packs the boxes | Edit products, prices and stock; manage customers, orders and CSA shares; take, reconcile, void and cancel payments; send payment reminders; design receipt and label templates; see customer contact details | Change settings, see where the money goes or the till PINs, adjust balances by hand, write off or claw back a payment, touch billing, devices or the team |
| Viewer | Your bookkeeper or accountant | Read sales and reports, products and stock, orders, settings and the team — and change nothing | See customers' contact details, where payments are sent, the till PINs or saved keys; change anything at all |
The one that surprises people is Viewer. A bookkeeper doesn't need to see your customers' phone numbers or your Venmo handle to reconcile your month — so by default they don't. They get the numbers, not the private details. (There's a small, deliberate exception: any role can print a product sheet, and those carry your Venmo, Cash App and PayPal payment QR codes — because those codes are meant for customers to scan. Nothing secret is on them.)
A rule of thumb for picking a role
Give the least access that lets the person do their job, and move it up only when they hit a wall:
- Someone minding the stand and taking payments? Staff.
- Someone who just needs the numbers — a bookkeeper, an accountant, a business partner who shouldn't change prices? Viewer.
- A true second-in-command who sets up card processing and manages devices while you're away? Admin.
- The occasional helper who only ever stands at the self-serve counter? They may not need a back-office login at all — the counter PIN is the only thing they'll ever touch.
You can change anyone's role in a click when the season turns, so it's cheap to start them low.
Setting it up
That's the whole model: a PIN on the counter so strangers can't wander off the sale screen, and a role in the back office so the people you trust see exactly what they need and nothing you'd rather they didn't. No per-seat cashier licences to buy, no permissions matrix to hand-build — just four plain roles and two codes.
Start for free, add your team when you're ready
TallyTill's Stand plan is free — no card required, no expiration — and roles and the till PINs are there from day one, whether your "team" is one person or a dozen. You don't have to decide any of this before you open; you can run the stand solo today and add a helper the week you actually need one.
Create your free account and set it up the way you'd hand someone your keys — one door at a time.
See the plans on the pricing page to compare what each tier includes.