What this article helps with: Understanding exactly who at your firm can draft, review, approve, and manage disbursements, plus how to grant those permissions and how to find out who your Disbursement Admin is.

Who this is for: Firm admins, Disbursement Admins, and anyone who has hit a permission wall while trying to draft a disbursement, approve a payment, or open the Disbursements page.

When not to use this article: If you are looking for general Hona user roles and how to add staff to your org, see "How to Add/Edit Users in Your Hona Org". This article only covers the disbursement-specific permissions layered on top.

There are two independent things at play, and they stack:

What you can actually do is the combination of both. A Team User who is granted Approver gets everything a Team User can do plus everything Approver unlocks.

This one surprises people, so it is worth stating on its own. A firm Admin who holds none of the three disbursement permissions cannot draft and cannot approve. Firms hand the Admin role out fairly freely for day to day system administration, and moving client money is a different kind of authority. Keeping the two separate is deliberate.

A Hona Admin can still do Admin things, including editing the default client message templates. They just cannot create or release a payment without a disbursement permission.

The three right-hand columns show what each permission adds on top of whatever role the user already has.

* The Disbursements tab is visible to everyone at your firm. What it shows depends on your permission: the firm-wide page for an Approver or Disbursement Admin, the same page scoped to your own drafts for a Drafter, and a short message explaining the restriction for anyone holding none of the three.

There is one Disbursements page, and everybody who can reach it gets the same one. What changes is how much of your firm it is showing you.

A Drafter gets the real page, not a cut-down version. Every part of it works the same way it does for an approver. The difference is that it is counting only the disbursements you drafted.

You will never see a row, a count, or a dollar figure that includes somebody else's disbursement.

You will hear when things move. You do not have to keep checking it. You are emailed about every status change on any disbursement you drafted, and that part cannot be switched off, so you find out when something you prepared is approved, lands, fails, or gets canceled. See "Disbursement Statuses and Notifications" for the rest of the notification settings.

Anyone assigned to a case can open it and see that case's disbursement status and full audit trail, with no disbursement permission required. For a case manager fielding a "where is my money?" call, that is the screen they want anyway.

The Disbursements tab itself stays visible to every user at your firm. It is never hidden and it never 404s. Opening it without a permission just tells you what you are missing and who can grant it.

Your firm's first Disbursement Admin is assigned automatically to the person who completes your firm's enrollment and bank connection. Nobody hands it out manually.

Once your firm is live, any Disbursement Admin can add or remove other Disbursement Admins. So you are not stuck with whoever clicked first, and if that person leaves or was the wrong choice, an existing Disbursement Admin can hand it to someone else without involving support.

Go to Manage Connection at app.hona.com/disbursements/connection. Your firm's Disbursement Admins, Approvers, and Drafters are all listed there.

If you have been blocked from drafting or from the Disbursements page, you do not need to go looking. The message you see names your Disbursement Admins and gives their email addresses.

If your Disbursement Admin has left the firm, another Disbursement Admin can add whoever should take over. If they were your only one, email [email protected] and we can reassign it.

A Disbursement Admin can also draft and approve disbursements without being granted Drafter or Approver separately. The permission includes both.

A Disbursement Admin does not need to be a Hona Admin. Firms often make an accounting or finance staff member the Disbursement Admin while leaving their Hona role as a regular User. External bookkeeping or accounting consultants can hold it too.

You do not need to grant Drafter to someone who is already an Approver or a Disbursement Admin. They can already draft.

Drafter is for the people who prepare the payout. At most firms that is the accounting or finance team, since they are the ones computing the settlement, subtracting fees, costs, and liens, and arriving at the client's number. Some firms also give it to case managers or paralegals who handle the client relationship. It is a safe permission to hand out: a Drafter cannot release any money, and they only see what they drafted themselves.

Approver is for the people who would otherwise be signing or printing the checks: a controller, an office manager, or a partner. This is also the permission that opens up the firm-wide view.

Disbursement Admin is for whoever owns the banking relationship and decides who else gets access. Most firms keep this to one or two people.

Small firms often skip Drafter entirely and give Approver to the two or three people who touch money. Drafter earns its keep at volume, where the person preparing forty payouts in a morning should not also be the person releasing them.

A note on internal controls. Hona does not force separation of duties. Anyone who can approve can also draft, which means an Approver can approve their own draft, and a Disbursement Admin can draft, approve, and send a payout alone. If your firm wants a second set of eyes on every payout, split the permissions deliberately: give the accounting staff Drafter only, and keep Approver with someone else. Every draft, every edit, and every approval is recorded in the audit log with the person's name attached, so the trail exists either way.

The short version: drafting requires Drafter, Approver, or Disbursement Admin, and a Hona role alone is never enough. Approvers can draft. Disbursement Admins can draft and approve. Only a Disbursement Admin decides who holds what. On the Disbursements page, Approvers and Disbursement Admins see the whole firm, a Drafter sees what they drafted, and everyone else opens the case. Permissions are all set from the Manage Connection page. Questions? Chat with our support team or email [email protected].