Divisons
- James Barnsley
Tātou's Divisions feature provides a three-level structure that segments your Tasks Categories, Clients, Locations and Employees into business units, or divisions.
Here is an example of how "Vine Experts Ltd" has used Divisions:
A 'waterfall' of accessibility
Clients, Locations and Employees are accessible above and below the division that they belong to. They are not accessible across divisions. Imagine branches of a river - you can travel upstream and downstream, but not across land.
For example a crew member at the Organisation level can be assigned work for any Client across all divisions and subdivisions. However if this crew member was in the ""South Island"" division, then they couldn't be tracked for work in ""North Island"" division or any of the ""North Island"" subdivisions.
Restricting the 'waterfall'
Sometimes you don't want accessibility to flow down to lower divisions. For example you may not want a manager at the Organisation level to be visible to crew leaders of any Division or Subdivision. Marking this manager as ""Restricted"" would prevent them from 'flowing' down the waterfall of accessibility.
Jobs, Timesheets and Expenses only flow 'upwards'
Jobs behave like a 'Restricted' record: the job (including its timesheets and expenses) will only be accessible to Employees at or above its Division. This prevents lower Division levels from accessing higher Division level Employee's timesheet data.
For example Dianne (Bay of Plenty) would not be able to see jobs or timesheets for her manager, Brian (North Island). But Brian can see Dianne's.
Jobs can have their Division inherited two ways: Location/Client/Leader, or Leader only. This can be configured under Organisation → Divisions → Settings.
Follow the Location (or Client or Leader)
By default, Jobs inherit Division from their Location, Client or Leader (in that order). For example an hourly internal job without a Client or Location would be available only to employees at or above the Leader's Division.
If a manager, like Brian, needs to view and approve all timesheets for employees in their division then the Client or Location will need to be added to their division or below. If the employee sits at the Organisation level to complete work for both the North and South Division, Brian will only see their jobs for his Clients or Locations.
This works well when Jobs are managed by orchard managers, and employees work across multiple orchard managers.
Follow the Leader only
Jobs will always inherit their Leader’s division. If they don’t have a Division set, then the Job will remain at the Organisation-level.
This works well when your Divisions are structured by managers and their employees, rather than by orchard managers.
Reports
Some reports require access to all of an Employee's timesheets to apply calculations (topups, paid rest breaks, etc). To ensure data remains secure within the appropriate 'waterfall', these reports can only be run by users at the Organisation level.
Other reports will only show data that is available to the user's waterfall.
Getting started
Create your Divisions
Login to Tātou Office
Navigate to Divisions (Account → Organisation → Divisions)
Click New
Parent is where you can select the parent Division (making this new Division a Subdivision)
Name is the name of this new Division
Save
Note: Subdivisions cannot be moved to another Division. Instead a new one will need to be created.
Assign a Division
Open a Client, Location or Employee. Employee division settings are under Login and Permissions.
Click Edit
Division is where you select the Division you want this record (Client, Location or Employee) to belong to. Leave empty to keep it at the Organisation-level.
Confine to this level if you don't want this record to be available to lower Divisions
Save
Note: Changing a Client's Division may affect its Locations. Moving a Client 'downstream' will update its locations to ensure they stay within the same 'waterfall'. A Location can be at or 'downstream' from its Client Division, but not above.
Filtering by Division
Jobs, Clients, Locations and Employees can be filtered by the Division that they belong to.
This dropdown filter can be found along with the existing filters.
Note: when applying a filter of Division (eg "North Island") then the results you see will be all records that are in ""North Island"" or one of its Subdivisions.
Changing an Employee's Division
When an Employee is moved to another Division or 'Restricted' is enabled, their entire 'waterfall' changes. Clients, Locations, Employees and Jobs they could previously access might now be removed from their access.
For Tātou Field, the Employee will need to log out and log back in to completely refresh their data to reflect their new 'waterfall'. Any jobs started for Clients/Locations that have been removed will now become abandoned - they will not be able to sync these.
This can be quite disruptive, so make sure you communicate with your Employee before changing this.