Employee fields let you add your own information to people’s profiles. A common example is a Department field: once everyone has one, you can see who works where, filter the Resource Planner by department, and group reports by it. This article walks through that example.
👉 For how employee fields work in general, see Employee Fields.
Creating a Department Field
Go to Settings > Employee fields and create a field called Department. Pick a field type with a dropdown list, and add one option for each department, such as Design, Development, and Marketing.
Assigning Departments
From the Employees List
Go to Resourcing > Employees and add Department as a column in your view. Employee fields are clearly marked in the column list.
Click the Department cell in a person’s row and pick their department from the dropdown.
📌 You can edit other field types, such as text and number fields, right in the list the same way.
From a Profile
Open the person’s profile, go to the Info tab, and fill in Department in the section where the field sits (General Information by default).
Using Departments Across Productive
Once people have a department, you can use it wherever their data shows up:
Time reports: employee fields are available in time reports, so you can break down logged time and capacity by department.
People reports: when you build a report on the People data source, group it by Department to compare departments side by side.
Resource Planner: filter by Department to see one department’s bookings and availability.
Department Field or Teams?
Productive also has Teams, under Resourcing > Teams. They overlap, but they work differently:
A Department field is a label. Use it to group, filter, and report on people.
A team is a group you work with. You can share projects, budgets, dashboards, docs, and task views with the whole team, and anyone you add to the team gets access automatically. Teams are included in the Professional and Ultimate plans.
If you only need to sort and report on people, a Department field is enough. If the group also needs shared access to work, use teams.