Your employee data serves as the foundational layer for everything that takes place within Sora. Personalizing emails, assigning tasks, even logging into Sora – none of it would be possible without employee data. In this article, we'll take an in-depth look at how this employee data is structured within Sora.
Profiles and fields
Each employee at your company will have their own profile within Sora and this profile will contain fields of information about that employee. A field is a key-value pair in which the key is the field name and the value is the bit of information for that specific employee. For example, in the screenshot below, we see an employee profile containing a “First name” field with a value of “Pamela”.
Field types
To help ensure the integrity of your data, each field has a designated field type which restricts the type of values that can be set on a given field. For example, the “Personal email” field has an email field type which only accepts valid email addresses.
You can see the field type for every field by navigating to the data management page within Sora.
Field groups
Each field is assigned to a field group. This helps keep profiles organized by grouping together related bits of information about your employees. For example, in the screenshot below, we have a "Relationships" field group which contains all the relationship fields for that employee.
Default fields vs. custom fields
Sora will automatically include a set of fields on all employee profiles. These are referred to as default fields and they relate to employee details that are typically relevant across all companies. There are default fields to store an employee's name, email address, role, manager, team, and much much more. Some of these default fields are used in special ways by Sora beyond just acting as a place to store a piece of information about an employee. For example, the “Email” field is what Sora uses to determine where to send notification emails anytime an employee is assigned a task.
While default fields cover a wide variety of details, Sora also gives you the ability to add any number of custom fields as well to store additional information about your employees. For example, let's imagine that every employee at your company is assigned an HR business partner and you want this relationship mapped within Sora. Not a problem – just navigate over to the data management page and add a new "HR business partner" field.
Once a field has been added, it will automatically appear on all employee profiles within Sora.
Sign in access and permission groups
In addition to storing fields, profiles are also where sign in access and permission groups get assigned to each employee. This determines what features and data within Sora an employee can view or edit. For more information on this topic, check out our article on Managing employee permissions.
