Assigning Org Units with Allocations

How to assign default org types (department, division, and office locations) with percent allocations to an employee.

Org types and org units allow you to organize your employees in specific ways for administrative and financial purposes. Org types are made up of org units. For example, within the org type Department, you might have the org units Marketing and Sales. For more information on creating your company’s org types and org units, visit our Org Types and Org Units guide.

This article contains information on assigning multiple org units with percent allocations to employees. For information on assigning org units without percent allocations, visit our Assigning Org Units (Without Allocations) guide.
 

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Not seeing Percent Allocations on your Namely site? Reach out to our service team and ask them to turn this feature on for you! 

 

What Are Percent Allocations?

Do you have employees who work across multiple org units? With Namely, you can assign employees to multiple org units and allocate a percentage of their work to each assignment. In other words, you can track if an employee spends 20 percent of their time in the New York office, and 80 percent in the LA office.

Employee allocations are reflected in certain payroll and general ledger reports, making it simple for finance teams to track costs associated with different departments, divisions, and office locations.

• Note: You can only use percent allocations with the default org types Department, Division, and Office Location. Percent allocations can’t be applied to custom org types.

 

Permissions

The ability to view and edit your own or others’ org units is determined by your role and permissions. Permissions are specific to each org type—for example, depending on your field group bundle configuration, you might be able to see or edit only the Department org type. Or you could be allowed to view and edit all three default org types. 

Assigning Org Units with Allocations

Default org units are assigned to employees on the Org Units and Teams tab of their profile in HCM. Depending on your role and permissions, you may not be able to view or edit all org types.

• Note for multi-EIN clients: If an employee belongs to multiple payroll companies, each company’s default org types will display on the employee’s profile, and the employee can be assigned to different org units for each company.

Once assigned, org units will also appear on the employee’s profile.

• You can change where the field displays on the employee profile from Company > Settings > Profile Fields by dragging and dropping it to your preferred location. However, you can’t rename the field. 

• Even though the org type field appears on the employee’s profile, you can only edit the field on the Org Units page.

 

Important Notes on Percent Allocations

• Allocations for org unit assignments of the same type must add up to 100 percent to save them.

• End dates must be after or the same date as the start date.

• Org unit assignments can have start dates that are backdated or future-dated. If a new assignment is future-dated, any current active assignments will be automatically end-dated to prevent overlapping class assignments.

• Back-dated assignments can’t be saved without an end-date to prevent overlapping with the current assignment.

• You can have gaps in org unit assignments—for example, one assignment ending on December 1 and the next one beginning on February 1. If gaps are present, that org type’s corresponding demographic record in Payroll will be marked as Incomplete. Incomplete assignments won’t prevent the employee from being included in payroll.

• There is a limit of 100 org units per type that can be allocated to an employee at a given time.

• You can’t allocate custom org units.

To assign org units with allocations to an employee:

1. On the employee’s profile, click Org Units and Teams.

2. On the Allocations tab, click Manage next to the org type you want to assign.

3. Click Add Record.

4. Select a Start date.

   • Start dates can be in the past, present, or future.

5. Select an org unit (will differ depending on what org type you are assigning).

   • The org unit dropdown will be populated with any org units you have set up at the company level.

6. Enter an Allocation percentage.

7. Click Add Department to assign another org unit and allocation percentage. Repeat steps 5 and 6 for as many assignments as needed.

   • Remember, your percent allocations must add up to 100 percent in order to save them.

8. Select a Primary assignment.

   • The first org unit you assign is the default primary assignment. For more information, see Primary Assignments below.

9. Click Save.

 

Deleting an Assignment

To delete an org unit assignment:

1. Click the three dots next to the org unit assignment.

2. Select Delete.

Primary Assignments

When allocating employees to multiple org units of the same type, you must select a Primary assignment. The primary assignment is the org unit that is used when filtering employees in HCM, creating workflow approval paths or sending bulk eSignature documents, and in HCM reports and non-allocation payroll reports. An employee’s primary assignments also appear at the top of their profile in HCM.

By default, the first org unit of any org type assigned becomes the primary assignment, however, you can update an employee’s primary assignment at any time. 

 

Assigning Custom Org Units

If you have created any custom org units at your company, they will not appear and cannot be assigned on an employee’s Org Units page. Additionally, you can’t use percent allocations with custom org units. For more information on custom org units, visit our Org Types and Org Units guide. 

Org Units in Payroll

Org unit assignments are optional unless the employee is assigned to a pay group in Payroll, in which case they must be assigned to at least one default org unit. If you are only assigning one org type, Namely recommends using Office Location for tax purposes.

If you add an employee to a pay group without assigning them to at least one org unit, they will appear on the Profile Status page with the missing field HCM Allocations. Click the link to be brought to their Org Units page and assign them to an org unit.

 

Payroll Demographic

Once an employee flows into payroll, any assigned org units will display on the employee’s Demographic tab of their payroll profile. Any org types that were not assigned will have a value of Incomplete. Similarly, if there is a gap in an employee’s org type assignments, the corresponding demographic field will display as Incomplete. 

• Note: In Payroll, Office Location is referred to as Branch.

Org unit assignments are read-only in Payroll. To make changes to an employee’s org units, click the link to be taken to their Org Units page in HCM.

• Note: Office location assignments on an employee’s payroll Demographic page don’t affect taxability. Only the assigned work and home locations on their payroll Tax page dictate where an employee will be taxed.

Payroll Reporting

While most reports in payroll—including the Payroll Demographic report—will only use an employee’s primary org unit assignment, there are four payroll reports that will account for all assigned org units as well as their percent allocations:

• General Ledger File with Allocations

• Payroll Register with Allocations

• Payroll Summary with Allocations 

Allocations are applied to these reports by taking the wages, deductions, and taxes and multiplying each by the allocation percentage. Note: Custom GL reports won’t use allocations.

• For example: Employee A is allocated 70 percent to Product and 30 percent to Engineering. The totals applied to the GL is $1,000m so $700 of his total cost is applied to Product and $300 to Engineering. In the GL file, it each allocation will display on two separate lines.

Assigning Org Units During Onboarding

As a best practice, Namely highly recommends assigning employees to their org units during onboarding. This allows you to capture all demographic data at once and immediately populate it on the employee’s profile, versus adding each assignment individually.

• Note: If you are using percent allocations, they cannot be assigned during onboarding, and will have to be added to the employee’s profile after their onboarding session has been completed.

To assign org units during onboarding, you’ll need to have the required fields included in your onboarding templates. To learn how, visit our Onboarding Templates guide.

Org Units in Workflows

Org units and percent allocations can be included in workflows so that employees can request changes to their own or others’ assignments. If the org unit is the primary field of the workflow—ie: a field an employee has permission to request a change to—a Request Change link will display next to the field on the employee’s profile.

• Note: If an employee belongs to multiple active payroll companies, they can’t use any workflows that include org types (as either primary or secondary fields).

For more information on workflows, visit our Creating a Workflow guide.