Departments — Transactions
Overview
Departments is a cross-functional feature spanning three linked transactions: the Departments catalog for defining the company's organizational structure, Department Administration for managing departmental budgets and access profiles, and Department Cost Center for reviewing historical spending against budget in a read-only financial dashboard.
For the record lifecycle and status transitions, see: Workflow.
Note
For common UI patterns used across SARA (tables, filters, dynamic columns, naming conventions), see: Common Features
Departments
Overview
The Departments catalog is the authoritative list of internal company departments. Each department has a name and a designated manager. This catalog feeds every part of SARA that references an organizational unit — including purchase order cost centers, budget allocation, timesheet reporting, and collaborator organization.
What you can do here
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View collaborators — Opens a read-only modal listing all collaborators currently assigned to a position within the department, alongside their position title. Available on both active and inactive departments.
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Manage positions — Opens an inline position catalog scoped to the selected department. Positions (job titles) can be added by name, renamed, and deactivated. A position cannot be deactivated while collaborators are assigned to it; reassign those collaborators to a different position first.
Note
When a new department is created, a "Manager" position is automatically created and the selected collaborator is assigned to it. Changing the manager via edit updates the collaborator assigned to that position — it does not create a new position.
Department administration
Overview
Department Administration is a year-scoped budget management hub at /department-administration. It displays one tab per department that has a budget configured for the selected year; departments without a budget for that year do not appear. This is the primary tool for tracking how a department's annual budget is allocated across spending categories and monitoring actual spend sourced from Purchase Orders. The hub also includes three cross-department tabs — Profiles, Activities, and Extra hours — each documented as its own section below.
Note
Budgets are initialized in Budget Administration (Finance). A department must have a budget record for the selected year before its tab appears here.
What you will see
Each department tab contains a budget summary panel at the top showing the department name, total budget, and unassigned amount (budget total minus the sum of all item allocations). The unassigned amount updates in real time as items are edited.
The budget items table presents spending by category with columns that have specific business meaning:
- Budget % — the proportion of the department's total budget allocated to this line item (assigned ÷ budget total), auto-calculated.
- Spent — total amount spent against this item, aggregated automatically from Purchase Orders tagged to this department and item. Displays a bracketed percentage (e.g.,
$1,198 [17%]) showing how much of the item's assigned amount has been consumed. Color-coded: green below 70%, orange from 70–89%, red at 90% and above. - Available — the item's assigned amount minus spent.
A totals row at the bottom of each tab summarizes Budget%, Assigned, Spent, and Available across all items in that department.
What you can do here
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New item — Adds a budget line item (spending category) to the department. Only the item name is required. Items persist across years; the monetary allocation is set per year using Edit.
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Edit item — Allocates or reallocates an amount from the department's unassigned pool to a specific line item. An Add/Subtract toggle switches the operation direction. The modal shows live context: available to assign, current assigned amount, spent, available, and total assigned across all items. SARA prevents over-allocation (cannot add more than the unassigned pool) and prevents subtracting below already-spent amounts.
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View POs — Drills down from a budget line item to all Purchase Orders charged to it in the selected year. From this list, each PO can be opened in a full detail view — including attached documents and an invoice/payment donut chart — without navigating away from the page.
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Request change — Submits a formal request to increase or decrease the department's total budget. Requires an amount, an Add/Subtract direction, and a details note for justification. On submission, SARA sends an email notification to company administrators. This action does not directly modify the budget — the change is reviewed and applied externally.
Warning
"Request change" sends an email immediately upon submission. There is no draft or recall step.
Profiles
Overview
Profiles are named permission sets that grant collaborators access to specific budget line items within a department. A collaborator assigned to a profile can create Purchase Requisitions charged to the budget items that profile grants, enabling controlled cost-center spending without opening full budget access.
What you can do here
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New profile — Creates a named profile associated with a specific department.
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Edit profile — Updates the profile name or reassigns it to a different department.
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Permissions — Opens the profile permissions modal. The left panel assigns or removes collaborators from the profile. The right panel shows all budget line items for the profile's department; a Grant checkbox per item controls whether profile members can charge that item on purchase requisitions.
Note
Profile status uses ACT / INA badges rather than the standard ACTV / INAC. The Logs action at the top of the Profiles tab covers changes across all profiles; there is no per-profile logs action.
Activities
Overview
The Activities tab manages a global activity catalog shared across all departments. Activities can be assigned to specific departments and are intended to support timesheet cost tagging in a future release.
Warning
Creating or modifying an activity in the global catalog affects all departments that reference it simultaneously. The system displays a warning banner to this effect when accessing the activity catalog.
What you can do here
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New activity — Adds an entry to the global activity catalog. Once created, the activity is available to assign to any department.
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Assign activities — Links an existing catalog activity to a specific department by selecting both from dropdowns.
Planned / Upcoming
Activities will be integrated with timesheet management, enabling time entries to be tagged against a department activity for internal cost tracking.
Extra hours
Overview
The Extra Hours tab records extra-hours entries for collaborators, scoped to date periods within the department context.
Planned / Upcoming
Extra Hours will be renamed to Overtime and will gain an approval and assignment workflow. The current implementation records entries only.
Department cost center
Overview
Department Cost Center (/department-cost-center) is a read-only financial reporting dashboard. It consolidates all spending charged to a department in a selected year — purchase orders, refunds, and timesheet labor costs — against the department's budget. It is a retrospective tool: users select a department and year and the page renders a full spend breakdown without any editable fields or write actions.
Note
The department selector here covers all departments that have a budget record for the selected year, company-wide. A department does not need to appear as a tab in Department Administration to be visible here. By default, users without the see all permission see only the departments they manage.
What you will see
The page is divided into a fixed budget summary panel on the left and three stacked data panels on the right.
The budget summary panel shows the department's fiscal position for the year:
- Original budget — the baseline amount set at the start of the fiscal year.
- Increased budget / Cut budget — the net adjustment resulting from approved budget change requests. A positive adjustment is labeled "Increased budget"; a negative adjustment is labeled "Cut budget" and displayed as a negative value (e.g.,
$-2,320.00 USD). Both are shown in red to flag them as modifications. Only one applies per department per year. - Actual budget — the effective working budget: original ± adjustment.
- Spent — the total amount consumed across all three spending types (SPOs + refunds + timesheets) for the year.
- Remaining — actual budget minus spent. Shown in red when negative, indicating overspend.
Below the top-level figures, the panel lists each active budget line item with its Budgeted amount (the allocation set in Department Administration), its Spent amount (sourced from POs and refunds against that item), and its Remaining.
The three right-hand panels each have independent search, export, and pagination controls:
- SPOs panel — purchase orders charged to this department/year. The Type column distinguishes "Requisition" (sourced from a purchase requisition) and "Logistics" (sourced from a logistics package). Shows an aggregate total in USD.
- Refunds panel — refund records (identified as
RF.xxxx) linked to this department's budget line items. Includes a Details column showing the reason entered at refund creation. - Timesheets panel — timesheet hours allocated to this department. Rate is the individual collaborator's rate in effect on the timesheet date; Quantity is the hours logged (decimal); Total is Rate × Quantity. All amounts normalized to USD.
What you can do here
- View all items — the only interactive action on the page. Opens a modal showing the full line-item breakdown of all SPO charges for the selected department/year, down to individual product or service lines (SPO reference, description, budget category, quantity, unit price, total, currency, date, and creator).
Note
All monetary amounts across the three panels are displayed in USD. Foreign-currency POs and refunds are converted using the exchange rate in effect at the transaction date.
Connections to other modules
- Collaborators (HR) — The Manager field in department records and all collaborator assignments in positions and profiles pull from the collaborators catalog. Timesheet rates displayed in Department Cost Center are drawn from each collaborator's salary record.
- Purchase Orders (Purchasing) — POs are tagged with a department and budget line item at creation. The Spent column in Department Administration and the SPOs panel in Department Cost Center both aggregate PO totals per department.
- Purchase Requisitions (Purchasing) — Profile access grants control which budget line items a collaborator can select when creating a purchase requisition.
- Refunds (Finance) — Refund records linked to a department's budget line items appear in the Refunds panel in Department Cost Center and are included in the department's total Spent figure.
- Budget Administration (Finance) — Budget change requests submitted via "Request change" are reviewed and applied in Budget Administration. Approved increases and cuts appear as "Increased budget" / "Cut budget" in Department Cost Center. Budgets must be initialized in Budget Administration before appearing in Department Administration.
- Timesheets (HR) — Timesheet hours allocated to a department are pulled into the Timesheets panel in Department Cost Center, with each entry valued at the collaborator's rate on that date.
Permissions
Permissions
Access and actions are permission-driven. See: Permissions