Employee Groups

Employee Groups are lists of employees, and can be used for several purposes. You can create employee groups that represent cost centers or divisions, for instance. These can then be assigned to the appropriate employees as their Reporting Group (see the Managing Employees help topic for more information). In addition, groups are used by Pacific Timesheet for managing application permissions. For instance, rather than assigning managers to specific employees you give the manager permission for a specific employee group (the Security help topic has more information about configuring permissions).

Employee groups have the following properties:

Property	Description
Name	The group name, up to 80 characters. A value is required and must be unique for all groups.
Description	A description for the group, up to 255 characters.
ID	The group ID, up to 80 characters. This value is not required, but if a value is entered it must be unique for all groups. The value here is commonly used when synchronizing with external systems such as payroll processing.
Status	The group status, either Active or Inactive. You can delete a group, but often it is preferable to change its status to Inactive. This will keep it from being used for new data entry, but allow it to be reported on for historical purposes.
Type	The group type allows you to control whether this groups shows up in lists or pickers on various parts of the application: Permission groups are used to provide fine-grained control of application security. For instance, you might create a Timekeeper group that is composed of users who enter time for other employees. All groups are always permission groups, regardless of whether they are also used as reporting groups or crews. Reporting groups are groups that are assigned to employees in their profile or properties page, and serve as the employee's current cost center or department (you can rename the term "reporting group" as appropriate for your organization from the System > General > Terminology page). The reporting group value is automatically recorded when an employee saves their time, making it easy to do departmental or cost center reporting and costing. Enabling the reporting group checkbox will allow the group to be selected on the employee properties page, as well as on the timesheet if the group field is configured for the timesheet template. Crews are groups of employees that can have their time recorded for them by managers or timekeepers using the Crew Timesheet page. Enabling the crew checkbox will allow the group to be selected on the Crew Timesheet page (as well as the Crew Approval Kiosk).

Notes

Clicking the Notes disclosure triangle allows you to review and enter notes about the group (up to 2000 characters).

Employees

Clicking the Employees disclosure triangle allows you to review and edit the list of employees belonging to this group. An employee can be in more than one group at the same time. If you want to check if an employee belongs to more than one group you can view their group membership on the specific employee's properties page.

Permissions

Clicking the Permissions disclosure triangle allows you to review and edit which employees or employee groups have been given special permissions for this group. Typically you would use this to assign an employee manager (someone with 'Can manage limited' Employee permission) to this group in order to review and edit time or asset entries for employees who are members of this group. See the Security help topic for more information.

Importing/Exporting Groups

You can import and export group data using CSV (Comma Separated Values) format files from the Employees > Groups page. When importing data a good way to start is to do an export first - this will generate a file you can use as a template. Once you modify this file (including removing unnecessary columns) to have your new data you can then import it back into the application. See the Group CSV Format help topic for more information on the import file format.

Note: The default format is CSV but you can change this from the Home > Preferences page.

Custom Fields

Like all major objects in the application, you can customize them by creating new fields. Choosing the 'Manage Custom Fields' option on the Employees > Groups page will let you create a variety of new fields or properties specific to your needs.