What are Reporting Groups?

A Reporting Group is a vertical grouping of employees. In most cases this will be aligned with your departments. For example: Sales, Marketing, HR, IT, etc.

What are Reporting Groups for?

Reporting Groups allow you to put your employees into groups that you would like to report on. We can then provide advanced reporting and data analysis. i.e. Director Reports (for the management team to compare performance against other departments) and for overall program analysis in the administration portal (i.e. How are Sales doing vs Marketing?).

Why do I need to map my departments to Reporting Groups?

To allow us to provide the above reporting reliably, etc. we must map your employees to a Reporting Group and the best way to do that is for you to map your departments to a defined list of Reporting Groups.

In a perfect world we would just map your departments to your Reporting Groups on a 1-1 relationship but due to the nature of different client’s data structures it is not always that simple. Our approach allows you to setup the Reporting Groups that you want for your program and then map your departments to them, either 1-1 or many-1.

Can’t I just setup one Reporting Group and map all my departments to it?

Although technically you can run with just one Reporting Group, in doing so you would remove a major advantage of the above reporting (i.e. Directors Reports, Cross Functional Analysis, etc.). If you're a small business, we recommend you just map them 1-1 with your departments.

How about the managing director or CEO?

Usually, you will have created a department in your HR system that contains your MD or CEO (and possibly their PA). If this is the case, just map this department to the appropriate director Reporting Group.

Example

Let's look at a practical example where Company A has the following departments:

• It’s obvious that all the “Sales….” ones are the same overall department but in this case the client wants “Marketing” to be combined so we can map them to an Reporting Group called “Sales & Marketing”
• “HR” and “IT” are individual departments so we can map those to appropriate Reporting Groups of “HR” and “IT”
• And finally, the client wants to combine “Finance” and “Payroll” so we can map them to a Reporting Groups called “Finance & Payroll”

This then becomes:

• These mappings can now be setup in the admin portal, and when the employee feed is uploaded, the employees will be added to the appropriate Reporting Groups.

Using department names vs references

In my above example I have shown a department name as well as a department reference. You can use either, but they must be unique so I would highly recommend you use something that doesn’t change.

For example, if you were using “Sales North” and it was mapped to “Sales & Marketing” everything would be fine until someone decided to rename “Sales North” to “Sales - North” in your HR System, at which point the employee feed would generate errors as it could no longer find “Sales North” in the department mapping. If, however, you had used “0001”, then changing the name in your HR Systems would have no effect.

Multiple Countries

When multiple countries are involved, it is even more important to have unique reference for the departments in your employee feed. For example, we can have

• UK > Sales
• US > Sales
• ES > Sales

If your feed contains just the string “Sales” then you can only map them all to one Reporting Group which would be in one country.

See Department Mapping to Reporting Groups for how-to instructions.