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Positions & org structure

Who reports to whom, who holds what title, and who can still log in.

The shape of an organisation is three separate facts that most systems keep in three separate places: the titles, the departments, and the reporting lines. AWRA OpsHub holds all three — and then does the thing almost nobody does, which is check them against who actually has access.

Position catalogue with grades · Departments as cost centres and asset owners · Manager-line org chart · Access reconciliation

Three separate facts

A title, a department and a manager are not the same thing.

Conflating them is the usual mistake, and it is why so many org charts are wrong. A Warehouse Supervisor in Operations reporting to the Operations Manager is three independent statements, each of which can change without the others.

Positions

A catalogue of job titles held once for the whole organisation, so "Warehouse Supervisor" means the same thing in three branches.

  • Title, unique across your workspace — no two spellings of the same job
  • Grade, for banding a title without a separate grading system
  • Description, for what the role actually covers
  • A live headcount beside each one, so an unused title is visible
  • Archived, not deleted, when retired — history keeps its titles

All of it behind one permission, manage_positions, because a title catalogue is a settings-shaped thing rather than a per-record one.

Departments

The organisational unit — and it does more work here than in most systems, because it is not only a label on a person.

  • Groups employees for rostering, availability and reporting
  • Acts as a cost centre across expenses and project costing
  • Owns assets and asset custodians, so equipment accountability follows the same structure as people
  • Filters the roster grid and availability board, so a supervisor sees their own team
  • Carries created, updated and deleted by on every record

Two departments ship as protected defaults so a new workspace is never structureless, and reading is a lower grant than changing.

Reporting lines

One field on the employee — their manager — from which the whole chart is derived rather than separately maintained.

  • No parallel hierarchy to keep in step with reality
  • Anyone with no manager is a root of the tree
  • Anyone whose manager is no longer an employee also becomes a root, rather than dropping out of the chart
  • Every node shows its position and department, so the chart answers three questions at once

That second-to-last point is the one that matters in practice. A chart that silently loses people when a manager leaves is a chart you cannot use during exactly the reorganisation you need it for.

The distinction that saves you later

An employee is not a login.

In a great deal of HR software, creating an employee creates a user account, because the software was designed for office workforces where everybody has a screen. That assumption breaks the moment you employ a storekeeper, a driver, a night guard or a machine operator — people who are rostered, paid, given assets and issued payslips, and who will never log in to anything.

So in AWRA OpsHub the link is optional. An employee record stands entirely on its own: it can hold a contract, a compensation package, bank details, statutory identifiers, attendance, leave, timesheets and payslips without any platform account existing at all. Where a person does need access, the employee record is linked to a login — and the two remain separate objects with separate lifecycles.

That is the right design, and it creates exactly one problem, which is worth naming plainly: two lifecycles can drift. Somebody is terminated in HR and nobody disables their login. Somebody joins, gets an email address recorded, and waits three weeks for access. Somebody comes back from a long absence and their login is still switched off. Each of these is invisible from either side on its own — HR sees an employment record that is correct, and user management sees an account that is correct, and only the comparison is wrong.

Closing the loop

One screen whose entire job is finding the mismatch.

Access reconciliation compares employment state against login state and puts every disagreement in front of you in three buckets. Nothing here is a new record to maintain — it is a comparison of two things you already keep.

Access to revoke Off-boarded people who can still sign in

Employees who are terminated or archived, whose linked login is still active. This is the bucket that matters most and the one nobody notices, because everything about it looks correct from either side alone.

Archived employees are deliberately included. Leaving them out would have been the natural implementation and would have hidden the exact case the screen exists to catch — somebody removed from HR whose access outlived them.

Revoking is gated by edit_employees, mirroring the termination path itself.
Ready to provision Active people with an email and no login

The onboarding gap, in the other direction. An active employee with an email address recorded and no account yet is somebody waiting on IT — and this is the list that turns that from a series of individual chases into one queue.

It only lists people with an email, because an employee with no email address is not waiting for access — they are one of the many people who correctly never need any.

Reading the whole screen needs only view_employees.
Re-enable candidates Active people whose login is switched off

Somebody back from long leave, a suspension lifted, or an account disabled during an earlier off-boarding that has since been reversed.

Re-enabling stays a deliberate act on the user screen rather than a button here. Turning access back on is a decision that deserves the friction; turning it off is the one that should be one click from the list that found it.

Revoking a login with no employee record takes edit_users — it can be an administrator or contractor who was never in HR at all.

Notice the asymmetry in those permissions, because it is not an accident. Revoking an employee's access is an HR action and takes the HR grant. Revoking a login that has no employee behind it is a user-management action and takes the user-management grant — because that account might belong to an administrator, a consultant or an integration that was never part of the workforce. Using one permission for both would either lock HR out of half the screen or hand HR the ability to disable the platform owner.

Headcount and plan

What counts as a seat.

Worth being precise about, because a headcount limit that counts the wrong people is a headcount limit that punishes you for keeping good records.

How your employee allowance is worked out
Plan allowanceincluded
+
Purchased seatsadd-on
=
Your allowanceor unlimited

A seat is a live employee — anyone not terminated. People you have terminated do not consume one, and neither do archived records. That means your headcount reflects the people you are actually managing today, and you are never charged for keeping the history of someone who left in 2023. Keeping good records has no price attached to it.

Where a plan is unlimited, the allowance is unlimited and add-ons are simply irrelevant rather than being quietly counted anyway.

The limit is a hard block at creation, and it is re-checked when the form is submitted rather than only when the form is opened — so a direct submission cannot slip past a check that only ran on the way in. The same block applies to bulk import, which is the obvious way somebody would otherwise add four hundred people to a plan that allows fifty.

Straight answers

What the structure does today — and what we can add to yours.

Org structure is where software promises the most and delivers the least, so here it is precisely.

The straight answer

What AWRA OpsHub does today

  • A position catalogue with a title unique across your workspace, an optional grade, a description and an active flag
  • A live headcount beside every position, so an unused or over-filled title is visible without a report
  • Positions archived rather than deleted when retired, so historical records keep the title they were held under
  • Departments as more than labels — grouping people, acting as cost centres, and owning assets and asset custodians
  • Department filtering that carries through the roster grid and availability board, so a supervisor works with their own team
  • Two protected default departments, so a new workspace is never structureless
  • An org chart derived from manager lines rather than separately maintained — promoting somebody redraws it
  • Employees whose manager is no longer an employee promoted to roots of the chart rather than dropping out of it
  • Every chart node showing position and department together, so the tree answers three questions at once
  • Employee records independent of logins, so storekeepers, drivers and operators are fully managed without a platform account
  • An access reconciliation screen listing three kinds of drift — leavers who can still sign in, joiners waiting on access, and returners whose login is off
  • Archived employees deliberately included in the revoke list, because that is the exact case the screen exists to catch
  • Revocation available from the same screen that found the problem, with separate permissions for revoking an employee's access and revoking a login that has no employee behind it
  • Re-enabling access kept as a deliberate act on the user screen, because turning access on deserves more friction than turning it off
  • A seat count of live employees only — terminated and archived people cost nothing, so keeping history is free
  • The headcount limit re-checked on submission rather than only when a form is opened, and applied to bulk import as well

More we can add to your workspace

  • Salary bands on a position — a minimum, midpoint and maximum per grade, with a warning when a contract falls outside the band
  • Headcount planning against positions — approved establishment versus filled versus vacant, with a requisition attached to each vacancy
  • A dotted-line and matrix reporting model, for people with a second manager or a project lead alongside their line manager
  • A department hierarchy — divisions containing departments containing teams, with rolled-up headcount and cost
  • An effective-dated org history, so the chart can be shown as it stood at any past date
  • A printable and exportable org chart, to PDF and image, with a department-scoped view
  • Automatic provisioning from the reconciliation screen — creating the login for a ready-to-provision employee in one action
  • A scheduled digest of access drift, emailed weekly, so the reconciliation screen reaches somebody on a cadence rather than waiting to be opened
  • A position-to-permission mapping, so a role's platform access is proposed from the job title on appointment
  • Succession and cover fields — who acts up when a manager is away, feeding approval routing automatically
  • A span-of-control report, flagging managers with too many or too few direct reports
  • Job description documents attached to a position and versioned, rather than a free-text description field

Where we point you to a specialist

  • Your grading structure and pay bands come from your own reward policy. We will build the bands and the warnings you specify; we will not ship a template and imply it is a market benchmark.
  • We will not decide who reports to whom, or propose a reorganisation. The chart reflects the decisions you have made; making them is management work, not software output.
  • Whether a role is genuinely redundant, or an employment change is lawful, is an employment-law question and stays with the people accountable for it.
  • We will not automatically grant platform access on appointment. A position can propose a permission set, and a person still approves it — an access control that provisions itself is not a control.

Salary bands and establishment planning are the two most-asked items here, and both attach cleanly to the position record that already exists. Tell us your grades, bands and approval flow and we will come back with a written spec, a timeline and a price.

One thing to set up early: the org chart is only as good as the manager field, and an employee with no manager is treated as a root rather than as an error. On a first import it is worth checking the chart's top tier — a wider top row than you expected usually means manager lines that did not come across.

Questions, answered

Positions & org structure FAQ.

Do I have to give every employee a login?
No, and most organisations should not. An employee record is fully functional without one — contracts, compensation, bank details, attendance, leave, timesheets and payslips all work. The login link is optional, which is what makes the platform usable for a workforce of drivers, storekeepers and operators.
How do I stop a leaver keeping their access?
The access reconciliation screen lists exactly that — terminated and archived employees whose login is still active — and lets you revoke from the list. Archived employees are included on purpose, because that is the case most likely to be missed.
Does terminating someone free up a seat?
Yes. A seat is a live employee, so terminated and archived people do not consume your allowance. You are never charged for keeping the record of somebody who left.
What happens to the org chart when a manager leaves?
Their reports rise to the top of the chart rather than disappearing from it. That is deliberate — a chart that loses people when a manager departs is unusable during exactly the reorganisation you need it for.
Can a position carry a salary range?
It carries a grade today, which is a banding label rather than a range. Minimum, midpoint and maximum per grade, with a warning when a contract falls outside the band, is the first item in the middle column above and attaches directly to the position record.
Can somebody have two managers?
Not today — the chart is a single-line tree from one manager field. Dotted-line and matrix reporting is work we can add.
Can I see the org chart as it was last year?
Not yet. The chart is drawn from current manager lines, so it always shows today. An effective-dated org history is on the list above.
Can I delete a department or a position?
They are archived rather than destroyed, and two departments ship as protected defaults so a workspace cannot end up with no structure at all. Archiving keeps the title on the historical records that reference it.
Ready when you are

Know the shape of your organisation — including its edges.

Titles held once, departments that own real things, a chart that redraws itself, and a screen whose only job is telling you where employment and access have stopped agreeing.