On the Departments screen, 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: For more information about departments, go to An Introduction to Departments.
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. 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. The parent/child structure is imperative, as you cannot have employees assigned to parent departments; only child departments can have employees assigned to them.
To add a new department, follow these steps:
- Click
>> Departments.
The Departments screen will appear.
- At the top right of the screen, click
.
The Add New Department screen will be displayed.
- In the Name field, type the name of the new department.
Note: If you are adding a department of employees for the sole purpose of archiving their data, select Use for Employee Archival. (
means selected, and 
deselected.)
By default, None will be selected for the parent department, meaning that this department is itself a top-level one.
- If you are creating a subdepartment, select the check box to the left of its parent's name in the Parent Department list.
- On the right, select the department groups to which the new department belongs. ( means selected, and deselected.)
The new department will automatically be assigned to the All Departments group.
Note: Department groups are for user access; they determine what employee data users can view when they use TAA. They are designed to be broader than your actual departments, such as a Mechanics department group, which can contain Mechanics subdepartments from various fleet groups. See the section "What Is the Difference Between a Department and a Department Group?" in An Introduction to Departments for more information. - Click
at the top right of the screen.
A success message will appear, and you'll be returned to the Departments page.
Note: You can now add employees to your new department, either individually on the Employees screen (see Adding an Employee or Editing an Employee's Record) or in bulk on the Departments screen (see Assigning Employees to a Department).