Give your people a home office

A person's office and a project's office are two different questions

Run multiple offices in one workspace covers the office a project belongs to: which studio owns this job. That's not the same question as which office a person works from, and until now Monument only let you answer the first one. A home office answers the second: where Priya Sharma actually sits, regardless of which studio's projects she happens to be staffed on this month.

Northlight Architects runs Melbourne and Sydney studios. Priya Sharma, the Senior Architect from set your team's availability, works out of the Sydney studio. Nothing about her home office changes her capacity or her rates; it answers a narrower question: which office does she belong to, the same way a project's office answers which studio a job belongs to.

Set a home office

Like every office-aware field in Monument, this one stays out of sight for a single-office firm. It only shows up on a resource's profile once a second active office exists.

1. 1

   Open Priya Sharma's resource profile and click Edit.

2. 2

   Open the Office field and pick Sydney Office.

3. 3

   Save. Priya's profile now shows Sydney Office instead of Not set.

What a home office actually drives

New projects default to it

Build a project from scratch without picking an office yourself, and Monument first reaches for your own home office, not the organisation's default. Priya creating a project from scratch now lands it in Sydney Office automatically, without her touching the Office field at all. Only a resource with no home office set, or one whose home office has since been archived, falls through to the organisation's oldest still-active office, the same fallback that's always existed.

Building from a template still puts the template first: a Sydney-flavoured template hands its office to the new project ahead of the creator's own home office. A home office only steps in when the template itself carries no office.

Reports can split people, time and allocations by studio

Once a resource has a home office, the Resources report gets an Office column and filter you can add and group by, exactly like the columns already covering job title and employment type.

1. 1

   Open the Resources report and add the Office column from the plus menu.

2. 2

   Filter Office to Sydney Office to see only Sydney's people, or group by Office to band Melbourne and Sydney side by side.

The Time and Resource Allocation reports go further: they already had an Office column showing which studio the project belongs to, and now carry a second, separate Home Office column for which studio the person belongs to. The two usually agree, but they don't have to. Priya, based in Sydney, can still log time or carry an allocation against a Melbourne project, and a row like that shows Melbourne under Office and Sydney under Home Office at once. Reading the wrong one of the two is the easiest way to misread a studio split on those reports.

Pools don't have an office

A resource pool, like the Architect pool from group people into resource pools, has no office field of its own and never will while its members can span studios. A pool is a shared bucket of capacity; the studio split lives on the individual members, not the container.

To see how a pool breaks down by studio, don't look on the pool itself; filter or group the Resources or Resource Allocation report down to that pool's members instead, using Home Office to see who's Melbourne and who's Sydney within it.

Troubleshooting

• The Office field isn't showing on a resource's profile. Same rule as everywhere else in offices: it only appears once a second active office exists. With just one office, there's nothing to choose between.
• A new project didn't default to my home office. Either you don't have one set, it's since been archived, or you built the project from a template that carries its own office; templates take priority over your home office.
• I can't find an office split on the resource pools report. There isn't one. Pools carry no office of their own; filter the Resources or Resource Allocation report to that pool's members and group by Home Office instead.
• A Time or Resource Allocation row shows two different offices. That's not a bug: Office is the project's studio and Home Office is the person's. They diverge whenever someone works on a project outside their own studio.

Where this fits next

A home office is a small setting with a real payoff: sensible project defaults and a studio-aware view of your people. If you haven't set up offices at all yet, start with run multiple offices in one workspace. Once projects and people are both tied to a studio, give each office its own billing identity covers what prints on the documents those projects raise, and break reports and accounting down by office covers the rest of the reporting split.