Sapling - Custom Profile Fields, Custom Tables, and Profile Templates

Introduction 

Setting up the right Profile Fields and Templates is important to help your team scale efficiently, ensuring you're always collecting the right information from the right people.

 

This article covers the following topics: 

• How to Edit Profile Fields
• Fields Categories
  • Create a new field
• Job Details & Custom Tables
  • 💡 Pro Tips
• Profile Templates
  • Create a new template
  • Add a Field to a Template
  • Default profile fields
  • Where can I see this information?
    
    

How to Edit Profile Fields

As an Admin or Super Admin, you can view Profile Fields or create new Profile Fields in the Administration Tools section under Profile Setup.

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To customize what fields of data you collect from your team, start by adding what general Fields you need (All Fields) and what specific Job Details you'd like to track (All Job Details). Once you have those foundations built, you can then create Profile Templates to make gathering information from team members a simple and repeatable process! 

Certain capabilities below are only available if you're using Sapling's Track & Approve add-on.

Fields

Sapling has 4 categories of data Fields that are stored on every team member's profile - Profile Information, Personal Information, Private Information, and Additional Information.

1. Profile Information - fields in this section are visible to all team members
2. Personal Information - fields in this section are typically only visible to managers, admins, or super admins.
3. Private Information - fields in this section typically contain confidential information that is restricted to certain permission groups
4. Additional Information - fields in this section are typically for anything else collected or maintained as part of your team member's information

Create a new field

To create a new profile field, navigate to one of the 4 sections and select “+ Add new field”. Add the field name, who needs to input this information, a description, and the type of field it is.

You are able to have different types of fields depending on the format of the information you want to collect. You can select numbers, monetary values, long text fields, and other types. Long text fields are limited to 2000 characters and will set the limit when integrating with other tools.

At this stage, the fields will be listed alphabetically; however, you can easily reorder these when building your Profile Templates.

Important note: Sapling masks some of the sensitive fields by default. When adding or editing a field (profile or job details), the fields are auto-masked if:

• Field type is
  • Currency
  • Social Insurance Number
  • Social Security Number
  • National ID
• Or the field name contains 
  • Compensation
  • Pay Rate
  • Social Security Number
  • Social Insurance Number
  • National Insurance Number
  • Bank Account Number
  • Options
  • Equity
  • Gender Identity
  • Disability
  • Salary
  • Shares
  • Bonus
  • Routing

Job Details & Custom Tables

The Job Details tab is where you can store, edit, and track custom data within a team member's profile.

There are two types of data that are stored in custom tables in the Job Details tab: Timeline Tables and Standard Tables.

1. Timeline tables are driven by dates and store information in chronological order. Timeline tables have an effective date (for example: tracking compensation shifts over time).
2. Standard Tables are used to track static information. It’s a snapshot of information, where the timeline and effective date don’t matter (for example: tracking hardware information like laptop serial number).

To create a new custom table, click "New Table".

You'll have a set of pre-built templates to choose from (all of which can be changed once created) or you could choose to "build your own". Select if it's a Timeline or Standard table and click "Save".

Use the "+ Add new field" button to add what data you'd like to track, and from whom.

Add as many columns as you need to track the exact information you need from your team.

💡Pro Tips:

• Examples of other types of information that can be stored in Custom Tables: Stock Options, Bonuses, Performance Review, Blood Types, Visa status, etc. - check out our pre-built examples!
• Data can be updated from three sources: By users with Edit permissions, through integrations, or through data migration (CSV uploads). When data is updated, the column "changed by" shows who updated the data.
• You can set an individual person, a manager, or a group of people to approve changes to your job detail tab. For example: all salary increases must go through Bob, the Head of Accounting, as well as a manager.
• You can set an expiration date for the request if it doesn't get approved/denied within a certain number of days
• The "multi-select" field type option is only available under "All Fields" and isn't available under "All Job Details"
• Once a table is created, it is not possible to switch its type from Standard to Timeline or the other way around

Profile Templates

Profile Templates allow you to pick and choose what Fields and Job Details should be collected from your team members based on their Location, Department, or any other group filters you've configured.

You can create Profile Templates associated with employee lifecycle events such as onboarding and offboarding. 

While you Onboard a New Hire,  Smart Assignment will pre-select the most likely template for you based on the group filters you've configured.

Note: When you change any of your team member's filters e.g. Location, the profile template will not be updated automatically. This is because you need to respond to the prompt 

"Should we remove existing values from fields if they’re not included in the selected Profile Template?" 

A second step would be to change the profile template on their profile.

Create a new template

Click the "New template" button, select a name, and click on Create. 

Click on Edit to update what Location, Department, or other Group Filters you've configured the template applies to and click on Save when done.

Add a Field to a Template

Click " Add field" and select from the dropdown what you'd like to be part of the template. You can drag and drop the fields into the order you'd like them displayed for users assigned this Profile Template. Use the handle on the left side of each field row to drag it into the position you want.

Once you have added a field to a template, you can make this any of these fields required on each template, this applies to both profile fields and job details.

Note that address-type and currency-type fields are influenced by the default country and default currency configuration under Platform Settings. Those settings determine which values are pre-populated as well as the localized display for users.

Default profile fields

Sapling is also able to set default values on profile fields of the following field types:

• Short text
• Numbers
• Coworker
• Multiple choice

When adding a new field to a profile template, fill in the optional "Field Default Value" to have that field auto-populate with a specific value.

Where can I see this information?

All profile field information is stored directly on every team member's Sapling profile. Based on the permission levels of the information, only certain fields will be visible to certain permission groups.

To learn how to run a report on these fields, check out our help article on Reporting in Sapling.