What do I need departments for?
A department structures the business and has a say in four places: who sees which clients and services when recording time, who the department manager is and therefore decides requests, what reports can be filtered by, and which task list a new joiner triggers.
As at:September 2026
What a department is
A department has a name and a description and structures the business. The detail page shows members, the manager and the clients and services assigned to it.
Members are assigned individually or as a selection from a filtered list. Departments can be imported from a file and exported as a file.
The manager is not a role
A department is assigned a manager, and that assignment reaches well beyond the department: whoever manages a department decides the requests of the people assigned to it.
Even so, the manager is not a role in the sense of the four roles. They appear in no role list and cannot be granted or removed through the role matrix. The assignment is made solely at the department.
That is the point at which a permissions check easily comes up empty: anyone wanting to know why somebody sees a request should look not only at the role but also at the department manager.
The steps here describe a running system. Anyone who does not have one yet sets it up during the trial and keeps everything created along the way.
What the assignment controls
A department is not just a label. Four effects hang on it, and three of them only become apparent when somebody cannot see something they expected.
Four effects of a department.
| Assignment | Effect |
|---|---|
| Clients to a department | Controls which departments see the client in selection lists and reports and may book against them. |
| Services to a department | Only assigned services appear for its members when recording time. |
| Department as a filter | Absence, project and time reports can be broken down by department. |
| Department as a trigger | Joining and leaving templates can be assigned per department, so different areas get different task lists. |
Clients to a department
- Effect
- Controls which departments see the client in selection lists and reports and may book against them.
Services to a department
- Effect
- Only assigned services appear for its members when recording time.
Department as a filter
- Effect
- Absence, project and time reports can be broken down by department.
Department as a trigger
- Effect
- Joining and leaving templates can be assigned per department, so different areas get different task lists.
Follow-up questions
- Is the department manager one of the four roles?
- No. They appear in no role list and cannot be granted through the role matrix. The assignment is made at the department itself. It still takes effect, though: a department manager decides the requests of the people assigned to them.
- Why does somebody not see a client in the selection?
- Because the client is assigned to a different department. The assignment controls who sees them and may book against them. The same applies to services.
- Do we need departments at all?
- For pure time tracking, no. They pay off as soon as you want to separate clients or services by area, break reports down or run different joining lists.
Describes the state of the application onSeptember 2026. What changes in the product is in the product updates.
Published by: AMNAU GmbH
Editorial responsibility: Ugur Aydogan, Product development.
Last reviewed: September 2026
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