Employee promotion tracking

[eibcga]

Hello all, a FMPA11v4 Mac beginner user here trying to design a human resources database to track employees and their promotions throughout their employment in a large publicly traded company. Attached is the ERD which I hope has the right idea.

An employee can receive many job ratings, and a rating can be shared by many employees. An employee can have many job positions, and a job position can have many employees. A department can have many locations, and a location can have many departments. A department can have many positions, but each position can only have one department. A division can have many departments, but each department can have only one division. A division can have many cost centres, but each cost center can only have one division.

Now that I have set up all these one-to-one, and many-to-many relationships using join tables, how do I know which layout to start entering records? Since it appears that each layout's context can access related records from each of the other related tables many "hops" away, is there a best layout to choose? I guess this would depend on my needs and which point of view to run reports from. But my question is about data entry.

I figured I'm supposed to just pick the Employee layout based on the Employee table, and start adding all the various portals to all the various join tables (i.e., Employee_Rating, Employee_Position, Dept_Location), then add child records to each portal?

[RodSierra]

This probably depends on who will be responsible for maintaining the data. In our case departments, cost centers are in our financial module, and maintained by accounting types. Our HR module contains Employee record, where the employee's home department and cost center is chosen. Once your data structure is in place, the Employee layout will most likely be the center of entry. In our financial module we usually have two layouts, one in list view for finding and reporting, and then a hybrid layout with a filtered portal to the side with form view of the fields for departments and cost centers. These see much less used once the organization is set up and stable. From the financial side, these folks rarely if ever access the employee records, and conversly the HR side has no or little access to the detail in departments and cost centers.