Why do my staff's assigned POS locations keep disappearing after a Shopify update?
Staff losing their assigned POS locations after a Shopify or POS update is a recurring, reported issue. Here's how to recover quickly and reduce how often it happens.
What's going on
A staff member shows up at the register and can't access the location they've always worked at, their POS permissions look wiped or reset to the wrong store. You check the staff permissions in your Shopify admin and the location assignment you set up weeks or months ago isn't there anymore, or it's reverted to something that doesn't match your actual team structure.
This isn't necessarily a one-off glitch. Some merchants have reported it happening again after a later Shopify or POS update, which suggests something in how permissions get carried across updates rather than a staff member accidentally changing their own settings. Because it tends to surface right when someone needs to clock in or process a sale, it creates real friction on the shop floor, not just an admin annoyance.
Why it happens
Shopify's staff permission system ties each user to specific locations for POS access, and that assignment has to persist across platform releases and POS app updates. When an update touches how permissions are stored or displayed, existing assignments can get re-evaluated against new defaults, and if that doesn't carry over cleanly, staff appear to lose access even though nothing was intentionally changed on the merchant's end.
When the same reset shows up again after a subsequent update, that pattern points to a recurring issue in the update process itself rather than a one-time settings change you made, which is why the practical response is a workflow habit, verify and document, rather than a permanent settings fix.
5 ways to fix it
Distinguish POS device location from staff account location access
Shopify POS has two separate settings that are easy to conflate: which location a physical POS device is registered to, and which location(s) a staff account is permitted to access. Before assuming a staff assignment was wiped, check both. Sometimes the staff account permissions are untouched and it's the device itself that reverted to a different location after an app update, which looks identical to a staff access problem from the till but has a different fix.
Re-check and re-save the staff member's location access
In your Shopify admin, go to the staff permissions area under Settings and open the profile of the affected staff member. In some reported cases the location assignment isn't actually gone, it just displays as blank or reset until you reopen the profile and re-save it, which restores the correct locations. Do this proactively after any Shopify or POS app update rather than waiting for someone to get locked out at the register.
Report it to Shopify Support with specifics
If this keeps recurring after updates rather than happening once, treat it as a potential platform bug and not user error. Contact Shopify Support with the staff member's name, the affected location(s), and roughly when the update happened. A concrete report with specifics gives Shopify something to investigate and improves the odds it actually gets fixed instead of resetting again next release.
Keep an external staff-to-location record as your source of truth
Maintain a simple record, spreadsheet or otherwise, of staff name, role, and assigned locations, updated whenever you change permissions in the admin. After any update, compare live settings against this record in a couple of minutes instead of relying on memory. It won't prevent the underlying reset, but it turns a stressful troubleshooting moment into a quick, confident fix.
Reduce reliance on granular per-location permissions where it makes sense
If your team is small or roles overlap heavily, consider giving trusted staff access to all locations, where their job genuinely calls for it, instead of hand-picking individual locations for each person. The more granular, location-specific settings you maintain, the more surface area there is for something to get reset or misread after a permissions-related update.
Bottom line
Shopify doesn't currently offer a way for merchants to automate or externally back up staff-to-location assignments, so this remains a manual admin-settings issue. The most reliable protection is a habit, verify access after every update and keep your own record, rather than an app-based fix, and BesPoP doesn't have a dedicated tool for this particular problem.
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