SOURCE:    Vacation Tracker
TITLE:     Guide: Departments and Sub-Departments
URL:       https://vacationtracker.io/knowledge-base/guide-departments-and-sub-departments/
LANG:      en
PUBLISHED: 2024-06-21
UPDATED:   2026-10-07
READING:   3 min
SUMMARY:   Departments group Users for approvals and reporting; Sub-Departments nest under a parent to mirror how your team actually works. Learn how the hierarchy behaves.
Guide: Departments and Sub-Departments
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Last updated on October 7, 2026

Guide: Departments and Sub-Departments

Group Users for approvals and reporting. Nest Sub-Departments under a parent to mirror how the team actually works.

3-minute read

A Department in Vacation Tracker is how you group Users for approvals and reporting. A Sub-Department is a Department nested under a parent Department. Together they let your Vacation Tracker structure mirror how the company actually works, so approvers route correctly and reports stay tidy.

Plan availability: Departments are on every paid plan. The Core plan supports up to 10 Departments; the Complete plan is unlimited. Sub-Departments count against the same total.

What Departments do

  • Route approvals: every leave request from a User in a Department goes to that Department's Approvers
  • Slice the data: Calendar, Wallchart, notifications, and reports can all filter by Department
  • Group the team on the dashboard: the Users page can be grouped by Department for cleaner scanning

Why Sub-Departments exist

Some teams are nested. Engineering has Backend, Frontend, and Mobile. Marketing has Brand, Demand Gen, and Content. A flat list of Departments would either lose that structure (everything under "Engineering") or duplicate it in the menus. Sub-Departments let you mirror the real structure without duplication. Nesting is organizational only: each Sub-Department still requires its own Users, Approvers, and settings.

Department

Engineering

Groups Users for approvals and reporting. Its Approvers act on all leave requests from Engineering Users.

Sub-Department

Backend

Nested under Engineering. Has its own Users, Approvers, and settings. Nothing is inherited from Engineering.

How the hierarchy behaves

  • Nothing is inherited: each Department, including a Sub-Department, requires its own Users, Approvers, and settings. Choosing a parent only nests it
  • Users belong to one Department: each User sits in a single Department, which may itself be a Sub-Department. Their approval flow follows that Department's Approvers

When to reach for a Sub-Department

  • The parent Department is large enough that having one combined Approver list would be unfair to whoever is covering it
  • A sub-team is in a different Location or has noticeably different leave patterns
  • A sub-team needs its own notification (a dedicated Slack channel, for example) without the whole parent Department seeing it
  • A sub-team has its own compliance or leave-policy rules that don't apply to the rest of the parent

What each role does

  • Administrator: creates and edits Departments and Sub-Departments, assigns Approvers, and decides how deep the hierarchy should go
  • Approver: only acts on requests in Departments (and Sub-Departments) they own. Spotting which Sub-Department a request comes from helps answer "is this within my scope?"
  • User: belongs to exactly one Department. That Department decides who their Approvers are and which policies apply

Common Questions

Yes. The hierarchy can nest multiple levels deep. In practice two or three levels is usually enough; deeper trees become hard to maintain and explain to the team.

Existing approved leaves stay exactly as they were. Future requests will route to the Sub-Department's Approvers from that moment on. No data is rewritten.

No. Each User belongs to exactly one Department at a time. If they need attention from a different team for a specific project, Labels (Complete plan) are the better tool for cross-cutting tagging.

What's Next?

Guide: Administrator vs Location Admin vs Approver vs User Guide: What Can an Approver Do in Vacation Tracker? Guide: Notifications Within Vacation Tracker
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