A department is the unit a user, a personnel record or an asset sits in - Facilities, Finance, Engineering, and so on. It is the middle of the three groupings under Organisational Structure, between the organisation someone belongs to and the group they work in.

The list is a simple set of names. Departments are not filed under an organisation: every department is available to every record regardless of which organisation that record is assigned to, so if two businesses in your system each have their own “Finance”, name them so you can tell them apart.

Before you start: you need an administrator account that can manage user and personnel settings. If Departments is missing from the section menu, your account does not hold that permission - pages you cannot use are hidden rather than greyed out.

Step 1: Open Departments

In the left sidebar open Configuration, click User & Personnel Settings, then click Departments under Organisational Structure in the section menu. The Departments page opens.

Step 2: Review the departments

The table lists every department by Name, sorted alphabetically, with a search box in the column header. Click a name to open it. The list is paginated at 10 rows and the page-size selector offers 10, 25, 50 or 100.

A selection column on the left picks a row, and the toolbar above the table offers Add, Edit, Delete, an Excel export of the list and Refresh.

Step 3: Click Add

Click the Add button above the table. The new department form opens.

Step 4: Name the department and save

Enter the Department Name and click Save. The name is the only value a department carries.

• It is required and may be up to 50 characters long.
• Letters, digits, spaces and the punctuation / . , - ' ( ) & : ; _ are accepted. Other symbols are rejected with a message under the field.
• Two departments cannot share a name, and the check ignores capitalisation, so “Facilities” and “facilities” count as the same name. If it is already taken you are returned to the list with a red message.

Step 5: Confirm the result

Back on Departments, the new department appears in the table and can be selected on user, personnel and asset records straight away.

Step 6: Open an existing department to edit it

Click the row of the department you want to change. The toolbar Edit and Delete buttons remain greyed out until exactly one row is selected. Click Edit (clicking the name in the table does the same thing).

Step 7: Rename it

The edit form holds a single field, the Department Name. Change it and click Save, or click Cancel to leave it as it was.

The rename follows the records: everyone already assigned to this department remains assigned to it, and screens and reports rendered from the live data show the new name. Badges and passes already printed keep the old name, because the name was printed onto them at the time.

Step 8: Confirm the change

You return to the table with a success message and the row shows the new name.

Step 9: Select a department to delete it

To remove a department, select its row and click Delete. Like Edit, the button only becomes active with exactly one row selected. In the example below a disposable department, “Temporary Department for deletion”, is being removed.

Step 10: Confirm the deletion

A confirmation page opens showing the department’s reference and name so you can check you picked the right one. Click Delete to remove it, or Cancel (or Back to Departments) to leave it alone. Deletion is permanent - there is no undo.

Nothing blocks a department from being deleted, including one that users, personnel or assets are still assigned to, and the confirmation page does not warn you that it is in use. Check first: reassign those records to another department, otherwise their Department field is simply left empty and they drop out of any grouping or report that relies on it.

Step 11: Confirm the result

You return to the table with a success message and the department is gone: search for its name and no row is found. It no longer appears in the department list on user, personnel and asset records.

Step 12: Assign the department to a record

The list exists so that records can point at it. On a user or personnel record open the Profile tab, pick the department from the Department list and save; the same field is on the Add User, Add Personnel and asset forms. The list always starts with None, so the assignment is optional.

Where the department is used

Once assigned, the department is more than a label:

• Lists and searches. Both the user list and the personnel list can show a Department column with its own search box. It is hidden to begin with: switch it on from the Show/Hide column menu above the table, and your choice is remembered next time you open the list.
• Bulk assignment. Select more than one row in the user list and click Edit: the Bulk Edit Users page opens and can set the same department on all of them at once.
• Reports. The events and movement reports carry a Department column, the compliance report includes it per person, and the Time Attendance report lists it beside each person.
• Badges and passes. Badge templates can print the holder’s department through the ${department} variable, and a generated visit-pass permit records the host’s department as the requesting department.
• Emails and messages. The ${host_department} merge tag inserts the host’s department into invitation and notification templates, and ${registrationDepartment} does the same for self-registration approval emails.
• Connected access control. When credentials are pushed to connected door controllers and access-control systems they carry the holder’s department. Some devices build their on-device directory from organisation and department, so a change here reorganises the entries on those devices.

Note that the department printed in the events report and sent to connected systems is the one recorded on the credential when it was issued, so re-issuing a credential is what picks up a later reassignment.

Public self-registration

If users register themselves through the public form, a Department list can be shown there too. Switch on Require Department under Configuration > User & Personnel Settings > Registration Fields to add the field, and the applicant must then choose one of the departments maintained here before they can submit.

Bulk import

The personnel and user import sheets have a Department column, and the importer also accepts the column headings Dept, Division, Unit and Section for it. A value that does not match an existing department is created automatically during the import, so review this list after a large import and merge any duplicates that spelling differences introduced.

Web service API

Departments can also be maintained from outside the product through /api/ws/v1/departments, which supports listing, reading, creating, updating and deleting by reference. The calling API key needs the department read or write permission, set on the key under Configuration > System Settings > Web Service API.