What is the difference between Access and Assignment?

You can assign employees, activities, and expenses to projects from the Projects > Settings > Assignment screen. Project Assignment applies to the time and expense screens only. 

Manage Access is a powerful feature in BQE CORE that allows you to control every employee's access to activities, expenses, and projects throughout the application. It ensures that confidential data is not accessible to employees who should not see it. Though it seems similar to project assignments, Manage Access is a security feature that applies to all screens, reports, and functions and not just the time and expense screens. Check CORE Help Center for details.

Typically, Manage Access takes precedence over project assignments, but if you want to further restrict the activity and expense items that an employee can use on a project, you can check the security permission Apply project assignments on top of manage access. When this bit is unchecked and you have assigned some projects, activity and expense items to an employee using Manage Access, you cannot use project assignments to further restrict which of those activity and expense items an employee can use on a project. However, if you check this permission, you can use it to further fine-tune the activity and expense items that an employee can use on a project. In either case, the projects, activity and expense items that an employee can use is always restricted to the ones assigned to them using Manage Access. Check CORE Help Center for details on customizing security permissions.

The best use case for this is a company with multiple offices. Employees of Location A are assigned projects belonging to Location A and they get to see only those projects throughout CORE. This can be accomplished by both features. However, there are businesses that have hundreds of projects. Assigning project to employees (Manage Access) is easier for them as compared to assigning employees to projects (project assignment). Check CORE Help Center for details.