Locations, Departments & Org Structure

Locations, Departments & Org Structure

1. What it is

Locations and Departments are the two organisational trees every admin configures before scheduling, leave, compliance, and most other apps work. Locations model where people work — from corporate headquarters down to individual stores, plants, or clinics. Departments model the functional groupings — Engineering, Nursing, Warehouse, etc. — independent of place.

• Access: both surfaces live under the Admin → Organization section of the sidebar. Locations are at Location Management; departments are at Departments. Requires the Administrator or Super Admin role.
• What it is not: Location Departments (floor, wing, unit sub-divisions within a single location) are a separate, opt-in feature gated by a business-level toggle — see §3.

2. Standing it up

Locations

1. Go to Admin → Location Management. The page opens on the Locations tab showing physical locations. Five tabs are available: Locations, Map View, Hierarchy View, Levels, and Import/Export.
2. Go to the Levels tab first. Levels define the tiers of your location tree — for example Corporate → Region → District → Store. The platform creates four defaults (Corporate, Region, District, Location) when none exist. Mark at least one level as a physical location — this distinguishes real work sites from administrative groupings and controls which locations appear in scheduling, time clock, and geofencing.
3. If your organisation matches a common industry shape, click Generate from Industry on the Levels tab. Templates exist for retail, healthcare, manufacturing, hospitality, education, food & beverage, technology, finance, transportation, construction, and professional services — each creates six levels with appropriate names and physical-location flags.
4. Return to the Locations tab. Click Add Location. A location requires a name; physical locations also require an address. Assign it a hierarchy level and, if it is not a top-level location, a parent.
5. Assign employees to locations from the user’s profile (Employment tab → Location) or in bulk via CSV import. Each user can belong to multiple locations; one is marked primary.

Silent-failure pairing: a location assigned to a non-physical hierarchy level will not appear on the Locations tab (which filters to physical locations). It still exists and is visible on the Hierarchy View tab — but an admin who creates a store under a “Region” level and does not mark that level as physical will not see it where they expect.

Departments

1. Go to Admin → Departments. The default view is a collapsible tree.
2. Click Add Department. Enter a name; optionally select a parent department to nest it, and assign a manager.
3. If starting from scratch, click Load Industry Defaults to seed a department tree for healthcare, retail, hospitality, or manufacturing.
4. Assign employees to departments from the user’s profile or in bulk. Users can belong to multiple departments; one is marked primary.

Silent-failure pairing: creating a department without assigning any employees to it means it exists in the tree but has no effect on scheduling groups, access scoping, or reporting — until someone is placed in it.

3. How it fits together

Location hierarchy (tree) — locations form a single parent–child tree per business. A location’s position in the tree is governed by its hierarchy level: a child’s level number must be higher than its parent’s (e.g. a Region at level 1 cannot sit under a Store at level 4). Circular references are blocked by validation. Each location inherits configuration from its parent or level when not set explicitly — timezone, work days, and jurisdiction all follow an inheritance chain.

Physical vs. administrative locations — each hierarchy level carries a Physical Location Level switch. Locations assigned to a physical level represent real work sites and appear in the main Locations tab, on the map, and in scheduling. Locations at administrative levels (Region, District) are organisational groupings that exist only in the Hierarchy View. At least one level per business must be marked physical. When you assign or change a location’s level, the location’s own physical flag is derived from the level automatically.

Departments (organisational) — departments also form a parent–child tree, independent of locations. Each department has a materialised path (e.g. /1/5/12/) that enables efficient subtree queries. Naming is unique among siblings: you can have “Admin” under both “Nursing” and “Finance”, but not two “Admin” departments under the same parent. Departments carry a manager assignment; if none is set, the platform walks up the tree until it finds one.

Location Departments (opt-in) — a separate concept from organisational departments. These are sub-divisions within a single physical location — floors, wings, units, zones, teams. They are disabled by default. An admin enables them at Admin → General Settings → Location Departments by turning on Enable Location Departments, which is off out of the box. Once enabled, you manage them inside each location’s detail page. Location departments can only be created under physical locations.

Jurisdictions — when a location is saved with a country, state, or city, the platform automatically resolves and links jurisdiction records. Jurisdictions connect locations to the compliance layer (labor law rules, employment law). The system matches against a built-in catalog of known jurisdictions and creates custom ones when a match is not found.

Scheduling teams — the platform can automatically create scheduling groups (teams) from locations, departments, or the cross-product of both. This is controlled by three business-level settings: auto-create location teams, auto-create department teams, and auto-create location × department teams. When enabled, creating a new location or department also creates a corresponding scheduling group.

4. Running it

Managing the location hierarchy

1. Go to Admin → Location Management → Hierarchy View tab to see the full tree.
2. Locations can be moved by editing them and changing their parent. The system validates that the new parent is at a higher hierarchy level and that the move does not create a cycle.
3. Bulk actions are available from the Locations tab: select locations and choose Update Level, Update Timezone, Update Work Days, Update Status, Mark Physical, Clear Physical, Change Parent, or Delete.

Importing locations

1. Go to the Import/Export tab on Location Management.
2. Download the sample CSV for the expected column format (name, address, city, state, country, timezone, parent name, hierarchy level, geofence settings).
3. Upload a CSV file. The import runs as a background job and reports results.

Configuring geofencing

1. Edit a location and enable Enforce Geofence.
2. Set latitude, longitude, and an allowed radius. The default radius is 100 metres (328 feet).
3. When geofencing is enforced, the platform uses Haversine-formula distance calculation to verify that clock-in/out events occur within the radius.

Managing departments

1. The department index shows a tree view by default. Switch to a flat list view with the view toggle.
2. Drag-and-drop reordering is supported in tree view.
3. Duplicate detection: the platform automatically detects exact and near-duplicate department names (normalising for invisible characters, HTML entities, and spacing differences). A banner on the index page shows how many duplicate groups exist. Click through to review and merge.
4. Merging: select duplicate departments to merge. The merge reassigns all references — employees, goals, scheduling groups, recruiting jobs, succession plans — to the surviving department. The merge preview shows an impact count before you commit. Large merges run as a background job.
5. Deleting: deleting a department prompts you to handle its staff (reassign to another department or remove the assignment) and its children (move to parent, promote to root, or delete all).

Importing departments

Department imports now go through Smart Import: Admin → Departments → Import redirects to the platform importer with column mapping and a review step.

5. Settings

Setting	Where	Default	What it changes
Location active	Location edit	On	Whether the location appears in pickers, scheduling, and reports
Physical Location	Derived from hierarchy level	Off	Whether the location is a work site (shows on Locations tab, scheduling, geofencing) or an administrative grouping
Enforce Geofence	Location edit	Off	Whether clock-in/out must occur within the allowed radius
Allowed radius (metres)	Location edit	100	Geofence radius for clock-in/out verification
Timezone	Location edit	Inherited from business	The timezone used for this location’s schedules, shifts, and reports
Inherit work days	Location edit	On	Whether work days follow the inheritance chain (location → level → business) or use a custom schedule
Budget Usage Basis	Location edit	Scheduled hours	Whether labor budget tracking is based on scheduled hours, timecard hours, or both
Enable Location Departments	Admin → General Settings → Location Departments	Off	Whether per-location sub-divisions (floor, wing, unit) can be created
Department active	Department edit	On	Whether the department appears in assignment pickers and reports

6. More help

• Users, Roles & Permissions — how to assign users to locations and departments.
• Business Profile & General Settings — business-level defaults that locations and departments inherit.
• Ask AI — the assistant answers questions about locations and departments from these articles.