Customize layouts per Security Group – sharing a practical approach

Show and Tell
,
1

Hi everyone,

In several real-world SuiteCRM projects, I ran into the same limitation:

layouts are global, even though different user groups clearly need different views of the same record.

For example:

  • Sales users don’t need accounting or VAT fields

  • Accounting users don’t need sales pipeline fields

  • Managers usually want a full overview

Security Groups work well for access control, but they don’t help much when it comes to UI clarity.

To address this, I implemented a small extension that allows different layouts per Security Group, while still:

  • using the same module

  • keeping the same data

  • avoiding duplicated modules or custom clones

The idea is simple:

each user sees only the fields that are relevant for their role, based on the Security Group they belong to.

I documented the concept, behavior, and limitations here in case it’s useful for others facing similar requirements:

This approach has been helpful in multi-department and multi-tenant setups where UI simplicity and data protection matter.

Happy to hear how others handle role-based layouts in SuiteCRM, or if you’ve solved this differently.

Thanks for reading!

1 Like