Manager Permissions

I am outsourcing some affiliate program management to Ryan Jones from GreenAffiliatePrograms.net. I would like to upgrade his permissions so he can see/use the Affiliate management kind of things but the manager group can see and edit everything including configuration,products, payment methods, etc. Is there a way to make the HikaShop stuff visible to Admins only?

I have setup HikaShop on a customer site and am ready to deploy. I went to give their user group permission to access the component (orders and products) only to find there is no permissions? This was the only thread I could find on the topic.

I'd happily try to hack the admin.hikashop.php file if I could understand what it's doing. I have two user groups I need to give access. Right now they can't see HikaShop in the back end at all. Since there is no fine-grained permission support, I can work with an all or nothing approach for now and hope for better permissions support in the future. Or better yet, front-end access! That would keep them away from configuration areas and still let them add products and retrieve orders. Ah well. One day...

I must say, this is the first place where HikaShop has disappointed me. Everything else about it has been great. (OK, I really don't like the way characteristics are handled but it works.)

Can you tell me what I need to do to hack admin.hikashop.php so HikaShop will display for a specific user group or two?

HikaShop Essential 1.5.3 on Joomla 1.6

Thanks