Departments let you group your teammates by division, office, or any other structure that fits your company; it work as a second layer of organisation alongside roles, so you can segment your people in more than one way.

Departments are handy when running custom, team or detailed reports — you'll be able to filter to any team in your company to see just the people in it. They are available on all accounts, with no setup or plan upgrade required.

Creating and assigning a department

Like roles, a department is created the first time you assign its name to a teammate. Administrators can create departmentss and assign them to people from a person's profile:

1. Head to Team, then click the Actions dropdown to the right of the teammate you'd like to add to a department.
2. Select Edit.
3. Go to the person's Basic info (left menu).
4. In the Departments field, add an existing department or type a new name to create one. A teammate can be assigned to one or more teams.
5. Click the Update info button at the bottom to save your changes.

Once a department exists, it will appear as a suggestion in the Departments field for every other teammate, so you can quickly add the rest of the group.

Assigning departments in bulk

To update departments (or roles) for several people at once, open Bulk actions in the left navigation and run the Update people action:

1. Choose the people to update, and select Update people.
2. In Fields to update, tick departments (and/or roles). The chosen fields become editable columns in the preview.
3. Enter the department name for each person. The name must already exist in your account — this replaces the person’s current departments with the one you enter, so use Leave unchanged for anyone you don’t want to touch.
4. Review the preview and confirm.

The same action also handles roles, weekly capacity, working hours, time zone and employee ID.

Editing a teammate's department

To change which teams a person belongs to:

1. Head to Team, then click the Actions dropdown to the right of the teammate you'd like to update.
2. Select Edit.
3. Go to the person's Basic info (left menu).
4. In the Departments field, add or remove department assignments.
5. Click Update info to save.

A department stops appearing in your account automatically once no teammates are assigned to it.

Filtering by department

After you've assigned teams, you can use them to narrow down what you see:

• Team page: click the Everyone dropdown at the top right and select a department to show only the teammates in it. If you have a lot of departments, start typing to find the one you want.
• Reports: filter team reports and Detailed time or expense reports by department to report on a single one at a time, instead of selecting individuals one by one.
• Create a report: leverage Departments as a field or metric to observe how different ones are performing across your organisation.

Departments vs. roles

Harvest gives you two ways to organise people, and you can use both at once:

• Roles describe a person's responsibility or position (e.g. Designer, Developer, Sales).
• Departments group people by division, or office.

The two are independent: assigning someone a role does not add them to a department, and adding them to a department does not give them a role. There's currently no automatic way to convert an existing role into a department.