Set Up The Organisation Structure

Before you can hire anyone, pay anyone, or even add a single staff profile, Veona HR needs to know the shape of your organisation: which departments you have, which positions (job roles) live inside them, and which grades (salary bands) those positions sit on. Get this right once and everything downstream — employee profiles, job requisitions, salary assignments, the org chart — simply points back at it. Nothing here is invented for you; every row is yours, per facility.

A quick glossary, because we will use these words throughout:

• Department — an organisational unit (for example “Laboratory”, “Nursing”, “Finance”). Veona HR reuses the one department model the whole product already shares, so a department you create here is the same department the clinical modules see. There is never a duplicate.
• Position — a named job role (for example “Consultant Physician” or “Medical Laboratory Scientist”). A position can be linked to a department and a grade, and it becomes a typed reference that employee profiles and contracts choose from a searchable list — never free text.
• Grade — a salary band with a minimum, midpoint and maximum amount and a currency (for example a band “GL-08” running 450,000 / 600,000 / 750,000 NGN). Positions sit on a grade; an employee’s pay is anchored to one.
• FK (foreign key) — the plumbing word for “a saved link to another record”. When we say a position “FK-references” a grade, we mean it points at a real grade row, picked from a list, so the two can never drift apart.

Meet Bisi, an HR Officer setting up a brand-new facility on its first morning. We will follow her from an empty tenant to a structure her colleagues can hire against.

Who / when: the HR Manager, HR Officer or Administrator, at the very start of a facility’s life — or any time a new department opens, a new job role is created, or a pay band is revised.

Set it up, start to finish

1. HR Officer — open Human Resources → People & Org → Departments. This is the shared organisation list. If the facility is brand new it will be empty. Press “New Department”, give it a name (for example “Laboratory”), save, and it appears in the list. Because this is the one shared org model, that department is now visible everywhere in the product — you never create it twice.
2. HR Officer — now open Human Resources → People & Org → Grades to lay down your pay bands before positions, so a position can be banded the moment you create it. Press “New Grade”. Enter a “Name” (for example “Senior Officer”), an optional “Band” label (for example “GL-08”), the “Currency” (a 3-letter code such as NGN), and the “Minimum”, “Midpoint” and “Maximum” amounts. Press “Save”. The grade appears with its band shown in real currency.
3. HR Officer — open Human Resources → People & Org → Positions and press “New Position”. Type the “Title” (for example “Medical Laboratory Scientist”). In “Department”, start typing and pick the department you made in step 1 from the searchable list. In “Grade”, do the same and pick the grade from step 2. Optionally set an “Approved Headcount” (how many of this role the facility is funded for). Leave “Active” on. Press “Save”.
4. HR Officer — repeat steps 1–3 for each department, band and role you need. As the catalogue grows, the readouts at the top of each screen tally your totals — Positions / Active / Staff Assigned on Positions, and Grades / Active / Positions Banded on Grades — so you can see the structure filling in.

Note

The order matters only for convenience. A position’s department and grade are optional links — you can save a position with neither and add them later. But creating grades and departments first means you can pick them straight from the list while the position form is open, instead of coming back to it.

Tip

Every reference field here is a searchable picker, not a free-text box. In the position form, “Department” and “Grade” only let you choose real rows you have already created. That is what keeps the org chart, contracts and payroll all pointing at the same definitions — humanely titled on screen, but linked by a stable reference underneath.

Other ways this goes

Creating a department (no duplicate, ever)

Veona HR does not keep its own private copy of departments. The Human Resources → People & Org → Departments screen is the same organisation model the clinical and finance modules use. So when Bisi adds “Radiology” here, the imaging team sees it too — and if Radiology already exists from an earlier setup, it is simply listed, not duplicated. One organisation, one source of truth.

1. HR Officer — open Human Resources → People & Org → Departments, press “New Department”, name it, and save. If it already exists, it is already in the list — do nothing.

Creating a position linked to a department and grade

1. HR Officer — open Human Resources → People & Org → Positions, press “New Position”.
2. Enter the “Title”, then pick the “Department” and “Grade” from their searchable pickers so the role is filed under the right unit and banded to the right pay range.
3. Press “Save”. The position now appears in the catalogue with its department and grade shown, ready to be chosen on employee profiles, contracts and requisitions.

Creating a grade with a salary band

1. HR Officer — open Human Resources → People & Org → Grades, press “New Grade”.
2. Enter the “Name”, optional “Band”, “Currency”, and the three amounts: “Minimum”, “Midpoint” and “Maximum”.
3. Press “Save”. Veona enforces a simple rule — minimum must be no greater than the midpoint, and the midpoint no greater than the maximum. If the numbers are out of order it shows “The band must satisfy min ≤ mid ≤ max.” and will not save until you fix them.

Caution

The band invariant (min ≤ mid ≤ max) is enforced both when you create a grade and when you edit one. If you raise a minimum above an existing midpoint, the edit is rejected with “Salary band must satisfy min ≤ mid ≤ max.” Adjust the offending value and save again.

Editing an existing position or grade

1. HR Officer — on Human Resources → People & Org → Positions (or Grades), find the row and press “Edit” at the end of it.
2. Change what you need — a title, a department, a grade, a headcount, the amounts in a band — and press “Save”.
3. To take a role or band out of use without deleting its history, switch “Active” off in the editor. It stays on record (and keeps any staff already linked to it) but no longer appears as a fresh choice for new positions or employees.

Searching the positions or grades catalogue

1. HR Officer — on Human Resources → People & Org → Positions, type into “Search title, code, department” to filter by job title, the auto-generated code, or department.
2. On Human Resources → People & Org → Grades, use “Search name, code, band” to find a band by its name, code or band label. Long catalogues page automatically beneath the table.

Starting from a true-empty tenant

On day one every list is empty and says so plainly — “No positions yet. Create your first position.” and “No grades yet. Create your first salary grade.” — each with a button to begin. There is no demo data to clear out and nothing hidden; you are building the structure from a clean slate.

1. HR Officer — start with Departments (the units), then Grades (the bands), then Positions (the roles that tie a unit to a band). Once even one of each exists, the rest of Veona HR has something to reference and you can move on to salary structures and your first hire.

What happens next

With departments, positions and grades in place, the scaffolding of your organisation exists and the rest of Veona HR can lean on it. Salary structures and statutory rules can now be defined against your grades, job requisitions can be raised against a department/position/grade, and every new employee profile can be filed under a real unit and banded correctly — all from searchable lists, never re-typed. This catalogue is the quiet foundation under everything that follows.

Follow the trail

• Next: Define Salary Structures And Statutory Rules · Add A Staff Member And Run Onboarding
• Related: Configure Approval Chains And Delegations · Move Candidates Through The Hiring Pipeline · Maintain Employee Profiles And Contracts