Department-based access

Department-based access restricts what technicians, requesters and operators can see in FreeMaint to the locations they are assigned to. Useful for multi-site or multi-department organizations where each shop floor team should only see its own work. You can restrict access for individual users or for an entire team at once.

Enable the feature

1. Go to Settings → System → Security & Access Control.
2. Toggle "Department-based access" on.
3. Save.

Assign users to locations

1. Open a Location detail page (e.g. "Production Floor 1").
2. In the Workers & Teams card, click Manage access.
3. Pick the users who should be limited to this location and its sub-locations.
4. Save.

Assign a whole team to locations

1. Open a Team (Organization → Teams) and edit it, or open a Location and click Manage access.
2. In "Locations this team can access" (or the Teams field on the location), pick the locations.
3. Save. Every member of the team is now scoped to those locations and their sub-locations.

A member's accessible locations are the combination of their personal assignments and the locations of every team they belong to or lead. The person set as “Manager / department head” of a location counts as assigned to it.

What scoped users see

• The locations they are assigned to (and any sub-location below) — and the assets, work orders, requests, preventive maintenance and analytics inside them. This includes roles that only raise requests: they see every work order in their locations, unless the role's “Work orders” setting is “Only their own work orders”.
• Nothing else. A user with no location assigned still sees the work orders they are involved in (assigned to them, created by them, raised from their request or watched by them); every other list stays empty until a location is assigned.

Projects

Projects follow the same rule. A user limited to their assigned locations sees the projects located in one of their locations, the projects that cover an asset they can see, and the projects they lead, created, belong to or own a phase of. A project with neither a location nor an asset is visible only to its participants. Team scope or “Only assigned” on their own never hide projects.

Roles that always see everything

Only roles with "Limit to assigned locations" ticked are restricted: by default Technician and Requester (and the Operator template). Admin and Manager are not, so they keep full visibility regardless of assignments. Tick or untick the setting on a role in Organization > Roles to change who is restricted.

Combine with "Assigned only"

You can keep the existing "Assigned only" toggle on at the same time. When both are on, a user sees the union: assets/orders inside their department and assets directly assigned to them anywhere.

Empty result on a page? If a user has the toggle on but no location assigned, they will see a yellow banner asking them to contact their administrator.

Team locations work without this toggle

If a role's Data visibility is set to Team scope, the locations granted to that user's teams already widen what they see — the assets, work orders, requests and preventive maintenance in those locations and their sub-locations — even when Department-based access is off. You do not have to link each record to the team one by one. The toggle above is what additionally restricts roles that see all company data.