The user hierarchy differs from a corporate hierarchy. In a corporate hierarchy, the president is at the top, followed by vice presidents, directors, managers, and general employees. In an administrative user hierarchy, the system specialist is at the top, followed by administrators, location administrators, and data entry users.

The publisher of a user is generally responsible for the administrative actions of that user and every user below in the administrative hierarchy. In the hierarchy, top-level users are generally not concerned with the performance of the measures that lower-level users own. They are responsible for ensuring that lower-level users are performing their administrative tasks appropriately, for example, creating objects correctly or distributing administrative roles properly to users below them.