Hi all

Firstly, apologies if this is in the wrong sub-forum. I wasn't able to determine which part of the forum this belonged.

I have a small company that has a couple different departments within it. I'm wanting to create a system that allows employees to enter their worked hours each day prior to payroll processing their timecards separately. This is a request from management. No taxes and such are calculated within this, this is more of a daily/weekly review to track overtime and hours worked. They call them "production reports". They use these when approving or flagging payroll timecards.

Ideally:

- each user login has their own "profile" layout where they can see their department and create their timecard entries for review.
- each user can only access/create their own respective timecard records.
- department managers can see their own timecards and the timecards of people within their department. The manager can also edit them if it's necessary.
- the administrator can select/view/modify all records and grant users managerial access rights, add new staff, generate reports for payroll, etc.

I have never worked with user-specific records before, but have limited experience with access rights. Typically my databases that have been deployed have about two users on average, so this scale of a solution is new to me. Basically my question here is what is the best way to structure such a database?

1) a table that contains users
2) a table that contains departments
3) a table that contains work weeks
4) a table that contains daily timecard entries

What is a recommended way to dynamically adjust what records are available to what user? For example, a day-to-day employee is promoted to manager and needs their privilege set changing. Is a hidden field within the record that contains the employee and manager's unique ID an option so FileMaker can permit or deny access accordingly? Some employees are affiliated with a union, so their respective overtime schedule needs to be applicable, but I believe I can achieve this through calculations.

Initially, buttoned up security isn't a huge concern, but obviously I would like to build this database with it in mind once it's approved and deployed. I'm also told this may be moved to a web-based service rather than their internal FileMaker system.

Thank you!

Edited January 30, 2025Jan 30 by madman411

Hi Madman,

There are a few ways to do this but most are around restricting access to records based on user account. The basic structure you have would work just fine you just have to setup restrictions based on user. 

This video might give you a good starting point. 

Kevin