With the Departments & Locations module, you can map your corporate structure in ZEP. This allows you to define departments, branches, or locations (under the Departments menu item), assign employees and projects to individual departments, store stationery, define department heads, and generate evaluations for time and costs per department.

An administrator can restrict any report by department.

In the Evaluations menu item, you will also receive an additional Departments tab:

A department head can select from the department(s) assigned to them. An administrator or controller can select all departments. Inactive departments are not offered in the list.

The default setting is the department of the logged-in user. Under Administration, you can also specify that "- any -" should be the default for administrators and controllers instead.

When a department is selected, only customers belonging to that department are displayed. By checking the checkbox, you specify whether customers from sub-departments of the selected department should also be included in the customer list.

If you select "- any -", all customers will be offered regardless of their department affiliation, even if their department is inactive.

If you use the Locations & Departments module, you must first configure a few basic settings under Administration > Departments > Settings.

A department head with the "User" role may use employees/projects/prices from other departments as copy templates during project planning.

With this setting, you can specify how much a department head is permitted to see and whether they are allowed to copy the corresponding elements from other departments for use in their own department.

Note: When you perform various evaluations as an administrator or department head, you have the option to pre-select a department. You can use a checkbox to specify whether only this department or also all its sub-departments should be considered. Depending on your corporate structure, you may always need "incl. sub-departments" selected. To avoid the inconvenience of checking the box for every evaluation, you can specify the default state of the "incl. sub-departments" checkbox here.

Note: When you perform evaluations as an administrator or department head, the department fields are defaulted to the department you are assigned to. Depending on your needs, it may be useful to have all departments as the standard setting. You can specify here whether the default should be set to "- any -".

A department head acts as an administrator at the department level.

They can record and manage employees, customers, and projects for their department, as well as run evaluations for them. Under the Administration submenu of an employee, a department head (just like an administrator) can record, change, and delete project times and, if applicable, receipts for that employee; however, they can only rebook data of their employees to projects within their own departments. A department head who holds "User" permissions themselves can only assign "User" permissions to the employees in their department. A department head with "User with additional rights" permissions can assign both "User" and "User with additional rights" to their department's employees.

The Departments menu item is available for selection by every department head, administrator, and controller.

As an administrator, you can select and edit or evaluate a specific department here; as a department head, you can select and edit or evaluate your own department(s) and any subordinate departments.

When you create a new department, a pop-up window opens where you can enter general department data:

After you have entered all information regarding the department data, confirm your entries by clicking "Save". You can then provide all further details for the department by selecting the corresponding submenu item.

In the Data submenu of a department, you can view the information provided when the department was created.

When editing a department, you can mark it as "inactive".

A department cannot be deleted as long as customers, employees, or projects are still assigned to it. Using the "inactive" option keeps the department in the system, but it will no longer appear in standard department lists—useful, for example, when a department is dissolved.

To see inactive departments again, enable the "also show inactive departments" option in the search criteria of Department Management.

Current employees, projects, and customers should be reassigned to other departments, while former employees and projects can remain in the inactive department.

By clicking the "Assign employee as department head" button, you can select and assign department heads for this department in the following pop-up.

In the Employees submenu, you can view which employees are assigned to this department. Department heads with appropriate permissions can create new employees for their department using the "New employee" link.

A department head with "User" permissions can only assign "User" permissions to their department's employees. A department head with "User with additional rights" can assign both "User" and "User with additional rights".

The list displays all currently active employees based on their entry and exit dates.

If you have reached the maximum number of employees allowed by your ZEP license, the "New employee" button will no longer be available.

Caution: When creating employees with future entry dates, ZEP will deny access if the number of "active" employees exceeds the license limit at that future point.

The employee list is sorted by username; clicking a column header reverses the sort order.

Numbers and most special characters are sorted before "A," while German umlauts (Ä, Ö, Ü) are sorted after "Z".

In the Projects submenu, all projects belonging to this department are listed in a table. You can create new projects for the department at any time via the "Create new project" link.Clicking on the project's short form allows you to jump directly to the corresponding project.

In the Customers submenu, all customers assigned to this department are listed in a table. You can create new customers for the department at any time via the "Create new customer" link.Clicking on the customer number allows you to jump directly to the corresponding customer.

If you are using the Absences & Overtime module, you can access the working time overview for employee blocks for the department.

For the selected month, all employees of the department including sub-departments are displayed with their daily hours worked in a table. You can filter the view by employee category. Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays are shaded in gray, while Sundays and holidays (or other days with zero regular working hours) are marked with red text. This overview helps identify if employees have forgotten to book their times. Clicking on a day opens a small window displaying all project times for that day.

Display Details: Working Time

Display Details: Billable/Non-Billable Distribution

Blocking Employees

You can also enter your own settings for email headers and footers for departments using a simple HTML editor.

Email Settings for Sending Invoices

If you send invoices to your customers by email, you can enter a department-specific email address here (deviating from the address specified under Administration > Settings > Email for automatically sent emails or the address specified under Administration > Settings > Faktura). If necessary, provide a sender name, a reply-to address, and a reply-to name.

Reply-To Name for Sending Invoices via Email Any potential reply from the customer to the invoice sent by email will be sent to this name.

Reply-To Address for Sending Invoices via Email Any potential reply from the customer to the invoice sent by email will be sent to this email address.

Please note:

In the Cover Page submenu, you will find an overview of all important data related to the department.

Department Cost Overview

Under the menu item Evaluations > Departments > Costs, a department head is shown a detailed list of all total internal and external costs incurred by their department per month. An administrator can evaluate all departments.

Mixed projects containing both fixed-price and time-based activities are marked with an asterisk (*). Projects for which no times or receipts were recorded during the evaluation period are not displayed.

When you go to Departments > [Department Name] > Actions > Delete, the system will indicate whether you can delete the department or which elements are currently preventing its deletion.

You can optionally enable "show inactive departments" to make them available for selection in evaluations.

Path: Departments > [Department Name] > Other

If you represent multiple companies as departments in your ZEP, you can enter additional data:

Enter your bank details here. This data is required for the creation of pdf/a-ZUGFeRD invoices. Likewise, this data is used as placeholder variables for the stationery. This means that if your bank details change, you can make the change here (link "New bank details") and the updated information will be automatically adopted into all your stationery templates where you have inserted a placeholder for this data. The fields Bank Name, IBAN, and BIC are also available as document variables for the stationery.

Each bank connection has the following fields:

For ZUGFeRD and as placeholders for stationery:

Only for stationery: