What is a job position and what can they do?

A job position allows you to define the responsibilities for the different stages of a job without concerning yourself with which member of staff will actually fulfil the position for any particular client. The obvious reasons to use them are as follows:-

1. They allow you to create workflow rules that will be sustainable and scale with the business. By avoiding referring to specific staff members in workflow actions you do not need to change them when someone leaves. Additionally even if you only have 1 person responsible for preparing VAT returns currently, by referring to the position 'VAT return preparer' rather than say Bob, you create a system that can easily scale to handle many different staff members, i.e. when you have more VAT clients than a single person can handle.
2. The most obvious reason is that across the practice you have more than one person doing the same thing just for different clients. For example if you have Bob, Bill and Ben that all work on monthly management accounts. Without positions you would either need to manually set every job to the appropriate person or to achieve any automation you would need 3 versions ('routes' as we call them) of your VAT return workflow, 1 which automatically passes the job to Bob, 1 to Bill and 1 to Ben. It is infinitely better to have a single workflow that automatically passes the job to a position called 'Preparer'. You then have a variety of different ways to allocate users into these positions which we discuss here but ultimately you have vastly simplified the workflows.
3. Positions also give you the opportunity to link a user to a job even if they are unlikely to take any active part in completing the job, this may be useful where a manager oversees a portfolio of clients without actually doing any of the work. The benefit here is that the user can filter his/her dashboard widgets to the linked view so they only see information about jobs that they are responsible for.

Each workflow system can have up to 16 different job positions which should be more than is ever needed! Typically Glide templates start with 3 job positions active which we call Partner, Manager and Preparer.

You can read how to activate extra job positions in this article.

Please also bear in mind that Slot1 (typically called Partner ) and Slot2 (typically called Manager) operate slightly differently. We have set these positions up to work how we would expect them to be required in a typical practice (if there is such a thing!) so to avoid the need for any further configuration. Slot1 will automatically be set to the client field Partner and slot2 will automatically be set to the client field Manager on all workflow system unless you set those slots to Not active. The idea is that the occupant of these client positions will hold a general relationship with the client and thus want to be linked to all jobs that are created in relation to their clients.

If your partner and/or manager roles are more functional than this, for example if you have users that are the 'VAT manager' for a client but not interested in any other work types, you would not want to put this user in the standard Glide manager field, instead we  would recommend creating a new client field and then activating a different slot specifically on the VAT workflow.

Users do not want to be linked to jobs unnecessarily, this will put jobs into their dashboards (where filtered to linked view) which makes the dashboard less useful.