On the Departments screen (which you access by clicking  >> Departments), you create a hierarchical structure of departments, using your school district's method of organizing your employees. All your employees MUST be assigned to a department in order to have their data recorded by Time and Attendance (TAA) and for them to appear in reports, the Work Monitor, and any of the TAA screens. This is especially important if your payroll system uses departments to compensate your workers. Make sure to match the department definitions payroll employs when you input them into TAA.

 


Note: If your drivers are clocking in to TAA via the Synovia mobile app, it is necessary to add departments to your vehicle groups (on the System Administration >> Groups screen) to allow them to search for the vehicle they are driving.


Many organizations have department structures based on the areas where their employees drive, such as North, East, South, and West; many school districts have departments set up based on the schools their drivers serve.


How Does the Department Hierarchy Work?


Your department structure should reflect your organization's real-world configuration, including parent departments (such as North) and child departments, or subdepartments (such as Jefferson Elementary School). For small organizations, you might have only one parent department, such as Transportation.


Be aware that parent departments cannot contain employees, so plan accordingly. Only child departments can have employees assigned to them. Therefore, parent departments should only be the overarching, highest levels of your organizational structure.


What Is the Difference Between a Department and a Department Group?


A department in TAA is directly correlated to your organization's employee structure — your actual departments as determined by Human Resources (for example). Department groups in TAA are designed to be broader groups, in which you can place multiple actual departments; they determine which employees' records a user can view and modify. For example, if you have a supervisor over your mechanics, you can set up a department group that includes only the mechanics and assign it to that supervisor; he or she would be able to see only the mechanics' employee data in TAA. When the supervisor runs a report, it will include only the mechanics' work hours. Your actual departments might be based on your fleets, such as Fleet 1 - Drivers, Fleet 1 - Mechanics, Fleet 1 - Aides, and so on, and each fleet could include a Fleet X - Mechanics department. If you have one supervisor for all the mechanics from all the fleets, you could create a department group named Mechanics for that supervisor and then place the Fleet 1 - Mechanics, Fleet 2 - Mechanics, and so on departments in that.


Note: In legacy TAA, department groups were created on the second tab of the Users page. In Synovia, you create them and assign actual departments to them on the Department Groups screen (accessed via the button of that name at the top right of the Departments screen).