Department, designation and other organization masters

How it works

1. Open Settings, Organization; seven tabs hold departments, designations, grades, cost centres, locations, employment types and employee categories.
2. Click Add and enter a name with an optional short code, for example Quality Assurance with the code QA.
3. Seed from data creates masters from values your company already uses and adds eight standard employment types, without touching existing entries.
4. Link each employee through the organization assignment on their profile, or bring departments, designations and locations in through Data Import.
5. The employee linkage panel shows, for each master, how many employees are linked and how many still have the value only as typed text.
6. Archive an entry you no longer use; employees who have it keep it, but it no longer appears in new selections.

What you can set

• Seven masters: departments, designations, grades, cost centres, locations, employment types, employee categories.
• Each entry: a name and an optional code.
• Standard employment types: Full time, Part time, Contract, Intern, Trainee, Consultant, Temporary, Other.
• Archive instead of delete.
• Linkage panel: linked and pending counts per master, plus reporting manager coverage.
• Import of departments, designations and locations from Excel or CSV.
• Archived entries cannot be assigned to anyone new.

Why masters beat free text

When departments are typed by hand, Accounts, Accts and A/C become three departments, and every headcount report is wrong by a few people. A master fixes the spelling once. The same goes for designations, where Sr. Executive and Senior Executive should be one title, and for locations, where an office should be named the same way on every record. Clean masters also make filters work across ZeniaHR, from the leave calendar to attendance analytics.

Worked example: setting up a school in Nagpur

A CBSE school in Nagpur with 85 staff sets up its masters on a Saturday. Departments: Primary, Middle, Senior Secondary, Administration and Transport. Designations: PRT, TGT, PGT, Lab Assistant, Accountant, Office Assistant, Driver and Attendant. Grades G1 to G5, two locations for the main campus and the junior wing, and employee categories Teaching and Non-teaching. Seed from data adds the standard employment types, and the school uses Full time for most staff, Contract for two bus drivers and Part time for the music teacher. After linking, the panel shows 80 of 85 linked to a department and 5 pending, which HR clears from each profile.

Tips for naming

Short, consistent names and codes pay off in every report, filter and export. Decide the naming rules once, write them down for whoever adds entries later, and resist renaming entries after people are linked, because history reads more clearly when old names stay as they were.

• Use codes that match your payroll or accounts codes, so exports line up.
• Keep designations as job titles and put levels in grades.
• Create a location for each office or site, even if it is also a branch.
• After a reorganization, archive old entries instead of renaming them.

Frequently asked questions