How your organisation structure works

What units and unit types are, how they fit together, and why your whole account is built on top of them.

Who this is for: Admins, and any Manager who wants to understand how the account is organised.

The short version

Your organisation structure is a tree of units. A unit is a real place or team you inspect: a hospital, a ward, a care home, a department. Each unit sits under a parent unit, building up a picture of your organisation from the top down.

Almost everything in Tendable hangs off this structure:

• People belong to a unit.
• Assessments and schedules are assigned to units.
• Results and reporting roll up the tree, so a hospital's score reflects the wards beneath it.

Getting the structure right early makes everything else easier.

Units and unit types

These two are easy to mix up, so it's worth being clear.

Every unit has one unit type. You set up your unit types once, then reuse them as you add units. Unit types can also carry a few extra fields if you want units of that kind to capture more detail, though most organisations don't need this.

The hierarchy

Units form a tree, with one unit at the very top. A typical shape might be:

• Trust (top-level)
  • Hospital
    • Division
      • Ward

You can go as deep as you need. The top-level unit is the anchor for everything else, so it's locked and can't be edited or deleted.

When you move a unit, everything underneath it moves too. Its child units, and the people and audits attached to them, stay connected.

Where you're assigned sets your reach

Each person is assigned to one unit, and that assignment flows down the tree. You can work in your own unit and everything beneath it, but not in units above it or alongside it. Someone assigned to a single ward works within that ward. Someone assigned to a hospital can work across every ward beneath it.

What you're allowed to do within that reach depends on your role. Roles, and what each one can do, are covered in Users & access.

Why some things are protected

Because so much hangs off the structure, Tendable stops you from accidentally breaking it:

• A unit can't be deleted while it still has child units, users, invites, or audits attached. You reassign or remove those first.
• A unit type can't be deleted while any unit is still using it.
• Sibling units (units under the same parent) need different names, so they're easy to tell apart.

These guard rails protect your history and stop people being left unassigned.

Who manages it

Only Admins can change the organisation structure. Other roles work within it but can't reshape it. Your structure is often set up with Tendable during onboarding, then maintained by your own Admins as things change.

Related articles

• Add, edit, and move a unit
• Create and manage unit types
• Set up your organisation structure
• Roles and permissions explained (roles, and what each one can do)