Grouping setup overview
Groupings enable you to customize reporting and filtering within the application. The implementation of groupings is a very important process, and should only be done after considerable thought and discussion about the structure of your firm and how to use the various grouping categories most efficiently and productively.
In some areas of the application, grouping information is used to establish criteria for later sorting. For example, when setting up a client, you can assign the client to an office, partner, manager, and associate. These groupings are not customizable, as the choices for each draw directly from the appropriate list of offices or staff. However, there are additional, customizable groupings that allow for enhanced filtering.
These additional groupings are Staff Departments, Staff Levels, Activity Categories, Client Entities, Engagement Categories, and Contact Categories. The setup screens for each are identical, so the process for setting up different grouping categories varies only in how each category is accessed.
note
Staff Departments, Staff Levels, Activity Categories, Client Entities, and Engagement Categories are user-defined terminology items. Your firm may refer to them by different names. You can view the default names for user-defined items by choosing Help > Enable Default Terminology (or by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+H).
To open the Groupings dialog, choose Setup > Groupings, and then the type of grouping you wish to make changes to. Alternately, you can right-click in a field tied to a particular grouping, such as the
Level
field in the Staff setup screen > Main tab, to manage groupings on the fly.General information
For each available grouping type, ID and Description fields are available. The ID field can be useful in setting up sorting that does not follow the alphabetical order of the Description field. Consequently, you may find it advantageous to use the ID field to establish hierarchical structures for later sorting.
For example, consider the
staff level
grouping. If you use numerical IDs for various staff levels, you can establish a hierarchical structure as follows:ID Description
10 Partner 20 Manager 30 Supervisor 40 Professional 50 ClericalIt is important that you consider the kind of information you want to be able to extract from your data before you set up elements such as groupings.