Employee administration

Every user of Case Manager is listed as an employee in the Employee List. This list maintains personnel information, as well as the security information and memberships for the user that determine what they can see and do in Case Manager and the cases they can access.

To access the Employee List select Lists > Employee List from the main menu.

The grid functions we have already seen at Understanding the grid allow administrators to add/delete employees, manage and export this list.

Details of the selected employee are displayed at the bottom of the screen.

Note that there is field to record an employee's Base Rate. This hourly rate is the cost to the organisation to employ this person and should take into account salary, sick and holiday leave, superannuation, office/car overheads etc. This figure is used in some reports to indicate profits, by comparing an employee’s base costs with the income generated by the work that they did.

Other important employee settings are accessible through tabs.

In particular, in the Security Groups tab you make the employee a member of one or more security groups. These are collection of system rights (permission settings) that determine what can be done in the system, as you will learn below.

You will find more detailed information about the Employee List in the rest of this site, starting at Employee List.

The video shows the Security Groups List in the Windows version of Case Manager, however the concepts are the same.

Security groups are defined in the Security Groups List. To access this list, select Lists > Security Group List from the main menu.

Security groups collect groups of permission settings that permit/prevent users performing actions (viewing, modifying, deleting, adding, etc) on entities in the system.

Permissions apply to the following areas:

• Accounts - including costs, invoices, payments and adjustments
• Administration - document templates and all reference lists
• Case Information - such as case details, contacts, documentation, estimates and case category
• Custom Fields (Tab) - basic functions for your system's custom fields

We will learn about Custom fields very soon.

• Personnel - employee information.
• Reports - standard reports.
• System configuration - administration functions such as security groups
• User Interface - for example being able to view certain parts of the software.

To prevent permission simply un-check a permission's Allow box. You will rarely need to tick the Deny box. Further details about this are in the rest of the site at Security Groups.

Each security group is a collection of settings for these permissions that correlates with a particular business role (consultant, manager, etc). You can customise the collections to suit the needs of your business and what you want different kinds of staff to see and do.

We saw above that you assign an employee to a security group at the Employee List in the Security Group tab. This defines what they can see and do in Case Manager, i.e. the areas of the program to which they have access.

Security groups save time when you add new employees, change an employee's role or when new permissions are added to the system as new system features are released.

Although it is possible to set the value of individual permissions at an employee's Permissions tab, you are advised to do this rarely if ever.

The team concept is a flexible feature and its ultimate use depends on the specific needs of your business. It allows you to group employees in terms of arbitrary teams for more cohesive group work. Select Lists > Other from the main menu and select Team from the List Type dropdown list.

The functions to support teams are:

• There is a team field for each case. i.e. each case can optionally be assigned to one team in the Case Details tab.
• There is a team field for each employee. Each employee can optionally be assigned to one or more teams. Select Lists > Employee List and click the Teams tab.
• You can filter and/or report on the Case List by teams. The report can include cases from all teams, or one team can be selected from the list and only the cases assigned to that team will be included in the output. This option is included in the following:
  • Case List
  • Sales Summary
  • Employee Charge Statistics

When an employee leaves the organisation, the Active checkbox in the Employee tab should be un-ticked to make the employee inactive.

Their account is now disabled and they cannot log in to your system.

If the employee has worked on at least one case, their account cannot be deleted. This protects the integrity of your database and enables you to view historical information accurately.

Users occasionally forget their passwords. If an administrator has the permission right of Modify Employee they can reset the password for that user at the Employee List.

Select the employee from the list and click the Set Password button in the Employee tab. A window pops up where the user should enter their new password and it will be reset.