Why Your Screen Differs From A Colleague's

You and a colleague open the same screen in the same application, and what you see is not the same: fewer rows, fewer columns, a missing button, a different total. This chapter is a diagnostic guide. It goes symptom by symptom, tells you what each one usually means, and gives you the checks to run before you ask anyone for help.

What This Is

This is a troubleshooting chapter, not an explanation of how access works. If you want to understand roles, groups and the layers of permission behind all of this, read Roles, Groups And Permissions first. Come back here when you have a concrete difference in front of you and want to know what to do about it.

Most of the checks below take under a minute and you can run all of them yourself.

Seeing Less Is Normally Deliberate

Start from this assumption, because it is almost always the right one: an application that shows you less than it shows a colleague is usually working exactly as it was set up to work.

Applications built on this platform are configured per role. Whoever set your application up decided which screens each role reaches, which records each role may open, which fields are visible, and which buttons exist. A salesperson who sees only their own accounts, a warehouse operator who sees orders but not margins, an auditor who can read everything but change nothing — those are all normal, intentional outcomes of that setup.

So a missing thing is not evidence of a fault. It is evidence of a difference, and the point of this chapter is to work out which difference.

There is a second reason to check before reporting: a large share of "I cannot see it" turns out to be a filter you left on, a saved view you switched to last week, or a folder you are standing in. Those you can fix in seconds.

The Four Things That Shape What Reaches Your Screen

Every difference on this page comes from one of four layers. Keeping them apart is most of the diagnosis.

The first three are not yours to change. The fourth is, and it is the one to rule out first — that is why every checklist below starts there.

Symptom Index

I Cannot See A Menu Item They Have

Navigation entries are granted per role, and one that you are not granted is absent. There is no grayed-out entry and no message explaining the gap — this is the single most common source of "the application looks different on your screen".

Likely causes, most common first

1. The entry is not published to any role you hold. Each navigation entry lists the roles allowed to use it.
2. The whole feature is not enabled for your application. Some capabilities are licensed separately. When one is not enabled it vanishes from the navigation with no upgrade message — which means your administrator may genuinely see an entry that does not exist for anyone else.
3. The entry was switched off. A navigation entry that is deactivated disappears for everyone, including people who had it yesterday.
4. You are comparing against an administrator. Administrator accounts bypass most of these checks, so "but it is right there on my screen" from the person who set up the application proves very little about your account.

What to do

1. Check you are comparing like with like: same application, both signed in as yourselves, neither of you viewing the application on someone else's behalf.
2. Look at the whole navigation, not the top of it. Entries nest — clicking a parent entry's icon expands its children instead of navigating. See The Application Window.
3. If your application gives you the search box in the top bar, search for the record you are trying to reach. If search finds it, you have access to the records and only the navigation entry is missing — that is a useful thing to report. A blank result proves less: search only covers fields your administrator marked as searchable, so it can come back empty for records you can open.
4. If a colleague sends you a direct link to the screen and it opens, the entry alone is missing. If it does not open, see My Colleague's Link Shows Me Nothing.

Example Tomáš and Alena are both in customer service. Alena has a Complaints entry in the navigation and Tomáš does not. Tomáš searches for a complaint reference and finds the record, and it opens. So the records are not the problem — only the navigation entry is unpublished to his role. His request to the administrator is one line: "Please publish the Complaints navigation entry to my role; I can already open complaint records from search."

The Special Case Of An Almost-Empty Navigation

If you land on a page saying "No modules available" with the text "There are currently no modules available for use. Please check your permissions or contact your system administrator.", this is not a fault to investigate: no navigation entry is published to your roles yet. If instead the navigation panel and the button that opens it are missing altogether, your roles are not permitted to use the navigation at all. Either way, report it as-is — it usually means a new account was not finished.

We Are On The Same Screen But I See Fewer Rows

This is the difference worth checking yourself, because the odds are good that the cause is on your side of the screen and takes seconds to clear.

Run These Five Checks In This Order

1. Read the saved-view name. If the screen offers more than one saved view, the far left of the control strip above the list carries a bordered button with a small caret, and its text is the name of the view you are looking at. Ask your colleague to read theirs. Different names means different lists — you are not looking at the same thing, and nothing is wrong. See Saved Views.

Also worth knowing: if you once marked a view as your personal default with the star next to that button, this screen opens on your default and your colleague's opens on theirs. Neither of you gets a warning that this happened.

2. Clear the filters. Look along the control strip for filter chips — small bordered buttons reading something like Status equals "Open". Each one has a trailing ✕ that removes it. If the list comes back empty and at least one chip is active, the empty area offers a "Remove filters" button that drops all the chips at once. Filters survive far longer than people expect: they travel in the page address, so a reload, the Back button, or a bookmark you made last month all bring them back.

3. Check the folder and the tags. If the screen has a folder panel, look at the breadcrumb at its top left — if it does not read "Root" you are inside a folder and seeing only its contents. If the screen has a tag strip, look for selected chips. A tag selection is not a filter chip and the "Remove filters" button does not clear it; deselect each tag by clicking it again. Also check whether you clicked a tag chip on a row by accident — that applies it as a filter. See Tags And Folders.

4. Empty the "Find on page…" box. The plain search box on the control strip hides rows as you type. It does not filter data, it hides what is already drawn, and it is quick to forget. Clear it and the rows come back.

5. Compare like for like, then refresh. Confirm you are both on the same page number and the same page size, and press the refresh button (the circular-arrow icon on the control strip). Lists are drawn once and never update themselves, so a record your colleague created two minutes ago is genuinely not on your screen until you refresh.

If All Five Are Clean, The Difference Is Access

If your saved view, filters, folder, tags and search box match your colleague's and the row counts still differ, you are looking at record scoping: your role is permitted to see a subset of that kind of record and theirs is permitted to see more.

This is a normal and very common setup — "only my own", "only my team's", "only records in my region", "only records that have been approved". It is enforced when the list is built, so what you get is a shorter list, never a warning.

There are also conditions on the screen you cannot see or remove. Whoever built the screen can fix conditions into it, and quick-filter buttons contribute conditions too. Neither appears as a removable chip. That is why a list can be shorter than the visible filters explain.

Example Two account managers open Opportunities, same saved view, no chips, same page size. Jana sees 212 rows and Marek sees 47. Nothing on screen explains it. The cause is scoping: Marek's role is limited to opportunities where he is the owner, Jana's is not. Neither screen is broken, and the only sensible request is a business one — "Should I be able to see the whole team's pipeline?"

I See Fewer Columns

Columns come from two independent places, and it is worth deciding which one you are dealing with before reporting anything.

It is probably your own column choice. Where the screen offers a Columns button on the control strip, anyone can add and remove columns for themselves. That choice is personal to the screen you are on right now — your colleague never sees it, and it is not stored against your account either. It travels in the page address, so navigating away and back returns the screen to the arrangement its saved view defines. Open the Columns picker and look at what is sitting in the Available list.

It may be field-level access. A field you are not permitted to see is not shown as blank or locked — it is absent. It disappears from the detail screen, from the form, and from the Columns, Filter, Group and Calculations menus alike. So the first test is: open the Columns picker and search for the field by name. If it is in Available, you have not added it, and that is the end of it. If it is in neither list, either you are not permitted to see the field or the screen was built without offering it as a column — which is why the decisive comparison is a colleague who does have that column on the same screen and the same saved view.

It may be the screen, not you. Two screens over the same kind of record can offer different columns and can even rename them. If you and your colleague are on different screens or different saved views, comparing column names proves nothing.

Example A purchasing assistant and a purchasing manager both open Suppliers on the same saved view. The manager has a Payment terms column, so the screen clearly offers it. The assistant opens the Columns picker, types "payment" into its search box, and finds nothing in either list. That is field-level access, not a missing click. The request writes itself: "Please give my role visibility of the Payment terms field on Suppliers."

For everything else about the picker, see Columns, Grouping, Merging And Calculations.

They Have A Button I Do Not

Buttons — the ones under or above a list, the entries in the Actions menu on a record, the ones in the right-click menu on a table row — are each granted separately. A button you are not permitted to use is removed, not disabled, so you cannot tell by looking that anything is missing.

Likely causes

1. The action is not granted to your role. Reading a record and changing it are separate grants, and so are creating, deleting, exporting and any custom action your administrator has built.
2. The button only appears in a certain state. Actions can be given conditions — Approve only on a submitted request, Send invoice only when there is an invoice number, Reopen only on closed tickets. On the same record on a different day, the same person sees a different set. This also explains a button that appears for a colleague on record A and for you on record B.
3. Permission can depend on the individual record. If your access to that kind of record is scoped, the buttons are re-checked against the record you are actually looking at. You can hold the same role as your colleague and still not get the button on their record.
4. The layout does not offer it. Row checkboxes exist on table layouts only. The per-record menu is opened by right-clicking a table row, and on cards by a small three-dots button on the card; boards, calendars and the simple list have no per-record menu at all. Switching the layout changes which controls exist. See Selecting Records And Bulk Actions.
5. The screen was built without it. An Add button, an export entry, even the refresh button can be left off a particular screen. Your colleague may be on a different screen over the same records.

What to do

1. Open the same record your colleague used, not a similar one, and compare there.
2. Note the record's state. If the button appears at one status and not another, say so — it turns a vague report into a precise one.
3. Check the Actions menu on the record detail as well as the buttons on the list; the same action often lives in both, and it can be present in one place and absent in the other.
4. If the whole Actions menu is missing from a record, that means nothing in it is available to you on that record — report that rather than one missing entry.

Example Two people process leave requests. Petra has an Approve button on Karel's request; Karel does not have it on his own. That is not a fault: approval is gated to the manager role, and it is also conditional on the request being in Submitted. Karel checks a second request that is already approved — Petra has no Approve button there either. Both observations together describe the rule exactly.

The Totals Do Not Match

Calculations are worked out over the records that reach you. They are not a property of the data, they are a property of your view of the data — so every reason your list is shorter is also a reason your totals are smaller.

Work through this order:

1. Compare the right figure. Each calculation shows two numbers, Displayed and All. Displayed covers the page in front of you and changes when you turn the page; All covers every record matching your filters, across all pages. Quoting Displayed at each other explains most mismatches on its own. Boards and calendars show only the All figure.
2. Match the filters, saved view, folder and tags using the five checks in We Are On The Same Screen But I See Fewer Rows. Anything that removes rows moves the total.
3. Remember that "Find on page…" changes nothing. It hides rows visually; both figures ignore it. A total that does not match the rows you can count on screen is usually this.
4. Refresh both screens. Two lists drawn ten minutes apart are two different moments. This matters most on figures that change all day — open orders, stock, hours booked.
5. Then consider scoping. If everything above matches and the totals still differ, you are each totaling a different set of records, and that is your finding: not "the sum is wrong" but "we are summing different records".

Example Two branch managers compare Sum: Amount on the same Open orders view at the same moment. One reads 612 450, the other 184 900. Neither is wrong: the second is scoped to their own branch. The reportable question is not "why is the total wrong" but "which branches should I be able to total?"

The same applies to dashboard figures. A widget normally renders under the permissions of whoever is looking at it, so the same widget can legitimately show two people two numbers. See Dashboard And Widgets.

A Field Or Related List Is Empty For Me

A record opens, but a field your colleague can see is not there at all, or a related list on a tab is empty for you and full for them.

• A field you are not permitted to see is absent, not blank. If a whole label is missing rather than showing an empty value, suspect field-level access.
• A field with no value is usually hidden too. By default, empty fields do not appear on a record detail. So an absent field can equally mean "nobody has filled this in on this record". Check the same field on a record where it does have a value before reporting anything.
• Related records you cannot see resolve to nothing. If a record points at something your role may not open, the link comes back empty — and an empty field is then hidden. The effect reads as "the data is missing" when the data exists and is out of your reach.
• Tabs are granted individually, and can depend on the record. A tab can be present on one record and absent on another for the same person.

The useful test is always the same: find one record where it works for you and one where it does not, and report both. That single pair tells your administrator whether the rule is about the kind of record or about individual records.

It Worked Yesterday

Something you used regularly has stopped working or disappeared. Three causes cover nearly all of it.

1. Your roles changed — and you have not signed in since. Your roles are read when you sign in. If an administrator adds or removes a role while you are working, your screen keeps behaving as it did before, sometimes for days. Sign out and sign back in. This is the first thing to try, before reporting anything, and it costs nothing.

Two related points that explain confusing reports:

• Changes to the rules behind an existing role take effect immediately, without signing out. So "the administrator changed something and it worked instantly" and "the administrator changed my roles and nothing happened" are both normal.
• If you are signed out with "Your login has expired. Please sign in again.", that is often an administrator applying a change deliberately. Sign back in and check whether the problem is gone.

2. The screen changed. Screens are configured, and configuration changes. Columns can be removed, conditions fixed into a screen, a control taken off the strip, a navigation entry deactivated, or a whole screen replaced. Nothing announces this.

3. A saved view is gone. If the view you always used has vanished from the switcher, it may have been deleted by whoever owned it, or the screen may no longer offer it — which saved views a screen lists is part of how the screen is set up. Your own saved views are private to you unless you were permitted to publish them, so no one else can lose those for you — but a shared one can disappear overnight.

What to do

1. Sign out and back in. Re-check.
2. Open the saved-view switcher and read the list of names. Is the one you used still there?
3. Clear all filters and tags, and check whether the thing you lost comes back.
4. Ask one colleague on the same role whether it still works for them. "It broke for all four of us this morning" and "it broke only for me" lead to completely different investigations.
5. Note roughly when it last worked. That single fact is often what identifies the change.

My Colleague's Link Shows Me Nothing

A link copied from the address bar carries the state of the screen — the saved view, the filters, the columns, the sorting, the page, the folder and tag selection. It does not carry any access. Sending someone a link never gives them anything they did not already have.

So the same link can produce four different results:

A link to a single record behaves slightly differently. If you may not open it, one of two things happens: inside a pop-up window you get "Object unreachable" with the message "The object you are trying to reach is not available. It might have been deleted or you do not have rights to display it."; on a full page you are quietly returned to the list with no message at all. Note that this same message also appears for records that have genuinely been deleted — from the outside, "deleted" and "not permitted" look identical, so do not read it as proof of either.

What to do

1. Read what actually happened and match it against the table above; the four outcomes mean four different things.
2. If you get an empty list, clear the filters the link brought with it — they are the sender's, not yours. What remains afterwards is the honest answer about your access.
3. Ask the sender for the record's title or reference, not only the link, and try the search in the top bar. If search finds it and the link does not, that is worth reporting. If search finds nothing either, do not conclude anything: search only looks at fields your administrator marked as searchable, so an empty result is not proof that the record is out of your reach.

Example A team lead pastes a link to "Escalations — this week" into a chat. One colleague opens it and sees 14 rows. Another sees 3 — same screen, scoped to their own cases. A third is returned to the sign-in page with the privileges message, because their role does not include that screen. All three outcomes are correct behavior, and each needs a different conversation.

I Can See It But Not Change It

Reading and changing are separate grants at every level, so being able to open something implies nothing about being able to edit it.

Likely causes

1. Read-only on that kind of record. You may list and open, but not edit. The Edit action is absent rather than disabled.
2. Read-only on that one field. You can edit the record, but a particular field is not offered in the form. On screen it looks like an ordinary read-only value.
3. Read-only on that particular record. Where access is scoped, editing is re-checked against the individual record: you can edit your own and not a colleague's, even on the same screen.
4. The field is locked by the form, not by permission. Fields can be made read-only or hidden depending on other values on the same record — a price that locks once an order is confirmed, an assignee that unlocks only in a certain state. Your colleague looking at a record in a different state sees a different form. See Creating And Editing Records.
5. The action was refused when you saved. If a save or a delete is blocked at the last moment, you get the generic dialog "Error When Processing Request" rather than a permission message. Its own advice is about selecting fewer items, which is unhelpful here — report what you were doing.

What to do

1. Open a record you are sure is yours and try the same edit. Working there and failing elsewhere points at record-level access rather than a missing right.
2. Note the record's state and whether the field is locked at every state or only this one.
3. Say precisely which field, on which record, in which state. "I cannot edit Discount on confirmed orders" is actionable; "I cannot edit orders" is not.

What Restricted Access Looks Like

There is no single "you do not have access" message. Use this as a decoder.

Nothing in the product tells you why something is missing. That is why the report you send matters.

What To Send When You Ask For Help

Send these nine lines. They contain everything needed to reproduce your situation, and sending them first usually saves a full day of back-and-forth.

Screen:            <module / screen name, as it appears in the navigation>
Saved view:        <the text on the button at the far left of the control strip>
Address:           <paste the entire address from the browser address bar>
What I expected:   <the record, column, button or number you expected>
What I saw:        <what was actually there, including any message, word for word>
When:              <date and time, and your time zone>
Colleague:         <who can do it, and whether they are on the same screen and saved view>
Already tried:     <filters cleared / tags cleared / folder at Root / signed out and in>
Happens:           <every time / only on this record / only since today>

Why each line earns its place:

• Screen and saved view — the same records are usually reachable through several screens, and each can be configured differently. Without both, nobody knows which one you were on.
• The address — this is the single most useful line. It carries the saved view, the filters, the columns, the sorting, the page and the folder, so it reproduces your exact arrangement. Copy the whole thing, do not retype part of it. If you were working inside a pop-up window, say so — the address does not describe what is inside a pop-up.
• Expected versus saw — the gap between the two is the report. Quote any message exactly; the messages in the decoder above mean different things and the wording distinguishes them.
• The time — needed to line your report up with the application's own records of what happened, and to establish whether a change to your account came before or after.
• The colleague — comparing two accounts is the fastest possible diagnosis, because roles add up: what one person has and another does not is exactly the difference to look for.
• Already tried — stops the first reply being "have you cleared your filters?"
• Happens — "on every record" and "on this one record" have different causes. So does "since this morning".

Two more things that raise your report from good to excellent:

• Name one case that works and one that does not. "I can open order 2024-0912 but not 2024-0913" narrows the problem to individual records in a way nothing else can.
• Say what you are trying to achieve, not only what is missing. Access requests are business decisions. "Please give me edit rights" is a request someone has to weigh; "I need to correct delivery dates on confirmed orders because customers call us about them" is a request someone can approve.

Where to send it: whoever supports your application internally. If you do not know, the person who set your account up is the right starting point.

Tips And Gotchas

• Sign out and back in before reporting anything that used to work. Role changes are picked up at sign-in, so this fixes a genuine share of reports on its own.
• An administrator's screen is not a reference. Administrator accounts bypass most of the checks described here and can even see capabilities that are not enabled for anyone else.
• Emptiness is the normal look of restricted access. Expect a shorter list or a missing control, not an error. Do not wait for a message before asking.
• Filters outlive your memory of setting them. They travel in the address, so a bookmark or the Back button restores them weeks later.
• Your default saved view is invisible until it surprises you. If a screen never opens the way your colleague's does, check the star next to the saved-view switcher.
• Nothing on a list updates by itself. Use the refresh button on the control strip before concluding that a record is missing.
• A pop-up window carries no address of its own. If the difference happens inside a pop-up, say which record you opened it from.
• A missing widget on your dashboard is the same story as a missing menu entry: widgets are published to roles. If one disappeared, do not rebuild your dashboard around the gap — ask.

What To Ask Your Administrator For

Ready-made requests. Each one is phrased so it can be acted on without a follow-up question.

• "Please publish the X navigation entry to my role — I can already open X records from search."
• "Please tell me whether my access to X is limited to my own records. I see 47 where a colleague sees 212, with no filters on either screen."
• "Please make the X field visible to my role on the Y screen; it is not in the Columns picker for me."
• "Please grant my role the X action on Y records — or confirm it is intentional that only managers have it."
• "Please confirm whether the X button is conditional on status. I see it on submitted requests but not on drafts."
• "Please publish the saved view X on the Y screen so I can select it", or "please let me publish saved views to colleagues".
• "Please check whether my roles changed recently — X worked on Tuesday and stopped on Wednesday."
• "Please confirm whether X is enabled for our application at all, or whether it is a role matter."

For a fuller catalog of things you cannot change yourself, see What To Ask Your Administrator For.

Related Chapters

• Roles, Groups And Permissions
• Filtering Your Data
• Saved Views
• When Something Goes Wrong
• What To Ask Your Administrator For