Setting up your organisation structure
Your organisation structure is the skeleton everything else in KAMI hangs off. Employees are assigned to it, approvals route through it, reports group by it, and payroll and attendance take real settings from it.
Where: My Team › Settings › Organization You need: the Team organisation right (cost centres have their own right)
Build this before you add employees
This is the one piece of setup worth doing in order. Every employee is assigned to a branch, department and position, so if those do not exist yet you will either create them hurriedly while adding someone, or go back and edit every profile afterwards.
An hour spent here saves a day of profile edits later.
What each one is for
| What it represents | Why it matters beyond grouping | |
|---|---|---|
| Subsidiary | A legal entity within your company | Carries its own address and tax registration |
| Branch | A physical work location | Drives attendance and payroll, see below |
| Department | A functional grouping | Approvals and reporting group by it |
| Position | A job title | Used for reporting and rules |
| Cost centre | A financial allocation | Where labour cost is charged |
| Groups & Teams | Flexible grouping outside the hierarchy | For anything that cuts across departments |
Branches carry more than a name
A branch is not just a label. It holds:
- Location coordinates — used to check where employees clock in from
- A timezone — attendance is interpreted against the branch's local time, not the
company's
- A tax registration number — used by payroll
Two consequences follow, and both cause confusion when missed:
- A branch with the wrong timezone produces attendance that looks wrong for everyone
assigned to it. If a whole location's clock-ins are shifted by hours, check the branch before investigating individuals.
- A branch with no coordinates cannot support location-based clock-in checks.
Set these when you create the branch rather than after people are assigned.
Subsidiaries
A subsidiary is a separate legal entity — a distinct registered company under the same KAMI account. Use one when you genuinely have separate legal entities, not to represent divisions or offices. Divisions are departments; offices are branches.
Subsidiaries carry their own address and tax registration, which is what makes them distinct from a branch for payroll and statutory reporting.
Departments, positions and groups
Departments and positions are the two most used, because approvals, reports and automation rules key off them. Keep the names consistent — "Finance" and "Finance Dept" as two departments will split every report that groups by department.
Groups and Teams exist for the groupings that do not fit the hierarchy: a project team, a shift crew, a committee. Use them when the grouping is real but cuts across departments.
Cost centres
Cost centres allocate labour cost. They need their own permission because they usually belong to finance rather than HR, and getting them wrong misstates the accounts rather than just a report.
Once the structure exists
Two things become worth doing:
- Profile Automations — automatically apply the right settings when someone is placed
in a given department or branch, instead of setting them by hand each time. See Profile Automations.
- Bulk Assignments — move many employees between groups at once, rather than editing
profiles individually.
Changing the structure later
You can add and rename at any time, but two changes deserve care:
- Renaming flows through to reports immediately, which is usually what you want — but
historical exports you have already taken will use the old name.
- Moving an employee between branches or departments changes what they are subject to.
Where Profile Automations are set up, the move can change their settings automatically — which is the intent, but it is worth knowing before you move a group of people.