Build the employee register: people, departments and locations

5 min read Updated 2026-08-30 WindoorERP 19.0

What this does

The Employees app holds one record per person who works for you — office, factory or site. That record is the anchor everything later in this journey hangs off: the skills and certificates, the working schedule behind the hours, the hourly cost behind the timesheets, and the badge and PIN the shop-floor terminal reads. This article covers the register itself: creating people, organising them into departments and locations, and what every tab of the employee form holds.

Before you start

You have HR access — regular users see only the public Directory; the full employee form with its private tabs needs an HR role.
Sketch the department tree first — each department names a manager, and the org chart and filters are built from it.

Load the workforce

An employee form with the Create User and Launch Plan buttons, the Work, Resume, Certifications, Personal, Payroll and Settings tabs and the organization chart panel

01
Open Employees › Departments and create the units you actually run — fabrication, installation, technical office, sales, administration — naming a Manager and, where useful, a parent department.
02
Add the places people work under Configuration › Employee › Work Locations — the factory, the showroom, the site offices — each attached to a company address.
03
Open Employees › Employees and press New for each person: name, Work Email, Work Phone/Work Mobile, then on the Work tab the Department, Job Position (plus a free Job Title) and the Manager.
04
For people who log into WindoorERP, press Create User (or link an existing one on the Settings tab) — an employee record alone does not sign in.
05
For factory operators, set the PIN Code and Badge ID on the Settings tab (with Generate and Print Badge) — these are what the production terminal will read.

The employee form, tab by tab

Tab	What it holds
Work	Department, Job Position and free Job Title, Manager, work address and Work Location — plus a usual-location line per weekday for people who split the week between sites, and the live Organization Chart panel with a Full Chart link.
Resume	The person's history as dated lines (experience, education, courses) and their current skills with levels — covered in the skills topic.
Certifications	Certificates with validity dates; the tab appears once certification-type skills exist.
Personal	Private contact details, bank accounts (with a salary-allocation wizard and a trusted-account toggle), legal name and civil data, ID, social security and passport numbers, and the Visa and Work Permit numbers with their expiry dates and document — the fields Gulf compliance runs on.
Payroll	The employment terms: contract Start/End Date, Wage, employee type, Contract Type, Pay Category and the Working Schedule. Load a Template fills the terms from a contract template.
Settings	The linked User, timezone, HR Responsible, the Hourly Cost that prices this person's timesheet hours, and the PIN Code and Badge ID.

The header carries Launch Plan — run an onboarding or departure checklist from the plans topic — and smart buttons for the person's Timesheets and their contract History (each change of terms is kept as a dated version).

Employees, Directory and Departments

Employees opens as a kanban of cards, with list, activity, graph and pivot views behind it, and a left panel filtering by department. It is the HR working view. Directory is the same people through a deliberately limited lens — name, position, department, work contact — readable by every user, so the factory can look up a colleague without seeing wages or passports. Departments shows each unit as a card with its headcount; opening one filters its people and names its manager.

Department cards with headcounts and managers on the Departments kanban

When someone leaves

Do not delete the record — archive it. Archiving an employee opens the departure dialog asking for a Departure Reason, a description and the departure date; the reasons list is maintained under Configuration › Employee › Departure Reasons. The archived record keeps the history — hours, skills, contracts — out of the active lists but on the books.

Troubleshooting

A new employee cannot log in — an employee record is not an account. Press Create User, or link an existing user on the Settings tab.

A colleague opens an employee and sees only public fields — expected: the Personal, Payroll and Settings tabs are HR-only; everyone else gets the Directory view of the same person.

The shop-floor terminal rejects an operator — the PIN Code or Badge ID on their Settings tab is empty or mistyped; that tab is where the terminal credentials live.

Timesheet costs show zero for someone — their Hourly Cost on the Settings tab was never set; hours are priced at that rate from the moment it is filled.

Common mistakes

Creating users without employees, or employees without users, for the same person — link them once and both sides stay consistent.
Leaving the Manager field empty — the org chart, approval routing and the department panel all read it.
Deleting leavers instead of archiving them, losing the hours and certificates history an audit will ask for.

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