Department in Frappe HR: Structuring Teams, Approvers & Leave Rules
A Department is a specialised functional area or division within your organisation, Sales, Engineering, Finance, HR, and so on. In Frappe HR, the Department is more than just a label: you can build a full departmental structure, attach a Leave Block List to it, and define who approves leave and expense requests for the people in it.
You will find it under Home > Human Resources > Employee > Department.
A tree-structured master
Department is a tree-structured master, which means you can create parent departments and nest sub-departments beneath them. This lets your setup mirror how the organisation is actually arranged, for example, “Backend” and “Frontend” sitting under a parent “Engineering” department, which in turn sits under “All Departments”.
This hierarchy is useful well beyond tidiness: it feeds reporting and permission structures, so you can view or control data at the level of a whole division or a single team.
NOTE
Tick the Is Group checkbox on any department that will act as a parent (a department that has sub-departments under it). A department without “Is Group” checked is treated as a leaf, it can hold employees but cannot contain other departments.
BEFORE YOU START
It is advisable to create your Company before creating departments, since every department is linked to a company.
How to create a Department
- Go to the Department list and click New.
- Enter the Department name.
- Select the Company the department belongs to.
- Optionally, select a Leave Block List that should apply to this department.
- Save.
If this department will have sub-departments under it, remember to tick Is Group before saving, and set its Parent Department if it sits beneath another.
Leave and Expense Approvers
One of the most useful things a Department does is route approvals to the right people automatically. On the department record you will find two tables:
- Leave Approver: the people allowed to approve leave applications for employees in this department.
- Expense Approver: the people allowed to approve expense claims for employees in this department.
You can add more than one approver to each table. When you do, the first approver in the list becomes the default, they are the one suggested automatically on new requests, while the others remain valid choices.
COMMON MISTAKE
Because the first approver in the list is the default, the order matters. If the wrong person is sitting at the top of the Leave or Expense Approver table, requests will keep defaulting to them. Put your intended default approver first, not just whoever you happened to add first.
Leave Block List
A Leave Block List is a set of dates on which employees are not allowed to apply for leave, for example, a financial year-end close, a major release week, or a peak sales period. Attaching one to a department applies those blocked dates to everyone in it, so you do not have to police the calendar manually.
TIP
Build your department tree to mirror your real org structure before assigning employees. With parent departments set up correctly (and “Is Group” checked where needed), reporting rolls up cleanly by division, and approver and permission settings cascade the way you expect.
Related Topics
- Employment Type
- Employee Grade
- Branch
- Designation
SUMMARY
A Department is a functional division within your company, and in Frappe HR it is a tree-structured master, so you can nest sub-departments under parents (tick “Is Group” on any parent). To create one, give it a name, link it to a company, and optionally attach a Leave Block List. Each department can hold Leave Approvers and Expense Approvers, the first in each list is the default, so requests from that department route automatically. A Leave Block List attached to the department stops staff applying for leave on specified dates. Mirror your real structure for clean reporting and predictable approvals.
