The User Groups feature is a way to segment ordering by team, department, geographic location, manager, etc., in order to track usage and spending. This is almost always utilized on employee or internal-facing portals, which have a defined user set. The User Groups feature contains the budget tool, which you can read more about in the "How the budget feature works" article.

When to use it

Frequent use cases include tracking ordering and/or spend for users divided based upon:

• Teams under different managers - e.g. allowing sales directors to approve orders placed by their own team members
• Departments - e.g. the Marketing department can't exceed $5,000 in total orders for the quarter, while HR can't exceed $8,000
• Office locations - e.g. at the end of the quarter, view how many orders were shipped to the San Francisco office vs. the New York office.

How it works

Setting up a new user group

Your Creative Project Manager/Client & Program Services Coordinator will assist with getting your user groups created, based on the below information.

1. Give it a name - the naming scheme should be based upon how you want to divide the users. For example, if dividing by office location AND department, the location names would be something like "Marketing - San Diego", "Marketing - New York", "Marketing - Seattle", etc.

2. Add users - any users added to the portal can be assigned to any user groups. Users may be assigned to one or multiple groups, or none at all. Groups can have an unlimited number of users.

Optional features

1. Select an approver - if an approver is selected, any orders placed by users added to the group will be sent to the approver to review and either approve or reject before the order can be processed.

2. Add a budget - if a budget amount is set, any orders placed by a user in that group will be counted against the user group's budget. Once the budget is depleted, users in the group cannot place any more orders until you would like us to reset the budget. 

3. Create a custom dropdown shown at checkout - we can add a custom dropdown menu shown at checkout to the users in that group specifically. 

Viewing report data per user group

Both the Sales and Shipments reports, which are accessible to program inventory managers in the "Standard Reports" area, contain a "User Group" column. If you download the report in a CSV format, you can filter the Excel rows to view only the orders for a certain user group.

If your program has multiple portals, make sure you select only the portal you would like to view the report for before downloading the CSV.