How to add a new person

Prerequisites: Admin or user management permissions in Operating. If adding an external person who will track time, you'll also need to understand permission sets.

This guide walks you through adding a new person to Operating — whether they're a new hire, an external contractor, or someone who's been with the organization but not yet in the system. It covers the essential fields, what to set up immediately, and what can wait.

If you’re starting to populate and set up an Operating organization from scratch, have a look at the Setup Guide – there are lots of ways to import people in bulk from sources like your HRIS or time tracking tools.

When to add someone

Add new people to Operating as soon as reasonably possible after the hiring decision is made. The earlier they're in the system, the sooner the staffing team can start planning their first project assignments. For new hires, this typically means adding them shortly after the contract is signed, even if their employment start date is weeks or months away.

Step 1: Create the person

Navigate to the People section and create a new person. Fill in the core identity fields:

Step 2: Assign a role and seniority

Set the person's competence role (e.g., Developer, Designer, Project Manager, Advisor) and seniority (e.g., Junior, Mid, Senior, Principal).

The role and seniority combination has two important effects:

• Billing rates. The rate card uses the role + seniority + site combination to determine billing rates when this person is assigned to projects. Getting this right means positions and allocations will calculate planned revenue correctly from the start.

• Staffing and filtering. When the staffing team searches for available people by role, this person will appear in the right results.

A person can have multiple roles (e.g., someone who works as both a Developer and a Project Manager), but one should be marked as primary. If the person's role is non-billable (like Internal Operations), positions with this role will have zero revenue rates.

Step 3: Set the cost rate

Set the person's cost rate — their hourly cost to the company. This is used to calculate tracked costs and planned costs, which in turn drive gross profit and margin figures.

The cost rate is typically derived from the person's salary and benefits divided by their expected working hours, but the exact calculation is up to your organization.

Setting the cost rate enables profitability reporting from day one. Without it, the person's time will show revenue but use the cost card defaults, potentially skewing margin figures.

Step 4: Set working hours (if non-standard)

Operating uses organization-wide default working hours. If this person works a different schedule — part-time, compressed weeks, or different daily hours — set their individual working hours to override the default.

Working hours affect:

• Allocation calculations. A 50% allocation for someone working 8 hours/day means 4 planned hours/day. For someone working 6 hours/day, it means 3.

• Utilization calculations. The denominator in utilization is based on working hours, so part-time people need accurate hours to show meaningful utilization percentages.

• Capacity reporting. The Capacity report uses working hours to calculate total available capacity.

Step 5: Assign to a group

Add the person to the relevant group(s) — the organizational units like departments or teams. Groups are used for filtering, reporting, and permissions. A person can belong to multiple groups.

Step 6: Set up skills (optional but valuable)

Add the person's skills with proficiency levels. Skills are used for resource matching — when the staffing team searches for someone with specific expertise, skill data makes that search effective.

For a new person, start with the basics: their primary technical skills and domain expertise. The profile can be refined over time, either by the person themselves or by their manager.

Step 7: Give them access (if needed)

A person in Operating doesn't automatically have a user account. To let them log in and use the application (e.g., to track time), you need to create a user for them and assign a permission set.

See Give team members access for how to create user accounts and assign permissions.

Permissions for external people

External contractors who need to track time in Operating should have a user account, but their permission set should typically be very limited — restricted to time tracking and basic information about the projects they're assigned to. Don't give external people broad visibility into your organization's projects, people, or financial data unless there's a specific reason to.

Adding an external person

The process for adding an external contractor is the same as above, with a few differences:

• Mark as external. Set the external flag so Operating distinguishes them from internal employees. This affects reporting (external people are tracked separately in headcount and capacity reports).

• Set the employment end date. External contracts usually have a defined end date. Setting this ensures the person appears correctly in capacity planning — the system knows their availability ends on that date.

• Cost rate matters even more. External contractors often have a higher hourly cost rate than internal employees. Getting this right is essential for accurate project margin calculations.

• Restrict permissions. External people should generally have a limited permission set focused on time tracking.

What to set up later

Not everything needs to happen on day one. Here's what can wait:

• Positions and allocations. These are created when the person is staffed onto a project, not when they're added to Operating. See How to staff a project from scratch.

• Detailed skill profile. Start with the basics and let the person or their manager refine it over time. If the person has a portfolio or a detailed Linkedin profile, you can link to those in the Bio section of their profile page.

• Reporting-to relationship. The "reports to" field can be set later when organizational structure is established.

When employment ends

When a person's employment or contract is ending, set the employment end date on their person record. This:

• Updates their status to "employment ended" after the date passes

• Removes them from future capacity calculations

• Preserves all their historical data (time entries, allocations, positions) for reporting purposes

• Does not delete the person — their data remains in the system

If the person had a user account, you may also want to deactivate their user to prevent further login access.

For more on managing employment lifecycle changes (parental leaves, schedule changes, contract extensions), see the employment lifecycle guide.

When should a person be archived?

Short answer: almost never.

If someone is actively working in your company but not interesting in terms of resource planning, e.g. working 100% of their time on non-billable supporting tasks, it still is a good idea to have them active in the system. Allocating them 100% to internal work will contribute to your Capacity numbers – this way you can see what part of your personnel is working on client work, internal work, time off and so on.

If some of your integrations bring in people that are simply not relevant for Operating use, consider limiting the scope of people brought in at the source. However, if someone is imported and you want to hide them, archiving is an option: this way the next time you refresh the integration the person won’t be created as new. The external reference that the archived person has will make sure that this person stays in the archive.

Related articles

• Give team members access — creating user accounts and assigning permissions

• Sites, Groups, Tags — setting up organizational structure

• Skills — managing skills and skill categories

• Cost Rates & Project Profitability — setting up cost rates

• How to staff a project from scratch — assigning people to projects after they're in the system