Administrators and account managers access the organisation structure, represented through teams, from the sidebar Administration --> Team structure menu. Initially, the list is empty. Use the "Add new team" button to get started:



This gives you the team creation form:



Type in any team name that is easy for you to recognise. Every teams must have a unique name. Then:


  • The drop-down menu of managers only contains users with the "Authorising manager" role. These managers will be able to view and approve expenses for employees for the team(s) they manage (and only those employees). If you have no users with this role when you try to add a team, then this menu will be empty. You can edit the team later to add a new manager, or change an assigned manager, if you want. Find out more about users and roles here.
  • Similarly, the menu of reporters only contains users with the "Reporting" role. This is a bit like a read-only authorising manager role; the reporters can view and generate reports for users within the team(s) inside the team(s) over which they have been set as reporters. A reporter of a given parent team can "see" all expenses claims from employees in all child teams and there are team-based report options that help aggregate insights at various levels within your organisational structure.
  • The "Parent team" drop-down offers no options yet as there aren't any other teams created at all. After creating the first team, it gets more useful. Whenever you are creating or editing subsequent teams, you can choose a different team from this menu to have the one team "belong to" its parent. This is how you can start to represent, should you wish, your organisation's structure through teams.
  • The "Grouped teams" menu is greyed out whenever there are no moveable teams which can be put underneath this one - this is the opposite of the "Parent teams" menu; it selects another team of which this one will become  a parent. This tends not to be used to much unless you're reorganising a previously established structure.
  • Anyone with the "Expenses user" role can be added as an employee, but note that nobody can be both a team member and a team manager.


The details you enter are checked for errors in the same way as for simple teams and team groups. If all goes well the the new team's details are displayed. On the right, you will see a new column, which doesn't make much sense until more teams are added - this is the navigator, providing an overview that lets you move freely around your collection of teams to make changes or view details of any part of your setup.



The buttons along the top let you edit the team easily, or add a new team as a child of the one you were viewing:

 


Here, you can see that the "Parent team" menu has been filled in for you. Of course, if you don't want whatever might be chosen here, you can change this selection to anything else. If you click on the "X" towards the right of the menu, the selection is cleared and the new team will be added at the very topmost level. RIPA generally recommend that more senior staff levels are represented by parent teams, with more junior groups held as children underneath those. Leadership groupings tend to be placed at the topmost level.


With a few more teams added, the navigator is easier to understand. The Administration --> Team structure view ends up looking something like this:



The items in the navigator are all links to view the details of each team. For example, clicking on "Demonstration parent team", now that it has some child teams added inside, now shows this:



You can jump to any level. Clicking on "Middle team" shows that team and lists the its one child:



Clicking on "Lowest level team" shows that team's details and indicates that it has no children:



...but you could certainly add another level of teams here with the "Add new team" button from this view and keeping the pre-filled "Parent team" menu selection.


When editing teams in this way, RIPA Expenses imposes no limits for how many teams you create at any particular level, or how deep the structure goes. You can keep adding children deeper and deeper levels, if that's what your organisation requires. The only real limit is that of being able to manage the teams and keep things in good order, since a very large number of teams or a very deep hierarchy could become rather cumbersome to maintain.