Departments on the Employee Portal

HR, Finance and Facilities can each appear as their own card on the employee portal, so a request goes straight to the team that handles it.

This is the portal's half of what department mailboxes

already do for email, where mail forwarded from hr@ arrives owned by HR.

Without it, an employee raising a request on the portal chooses what kind of request it

is — an issue or a service request — and nothing about who should handle it. QueAssist

works the team out from what they wrote, which is usually right and occasionally isn't.

Letting them say "this is for HR" removes the guess.

1. Turning a department on

Go to Settings → Groups, open the group, and switch on On the employee portal.

It appears on the portal straight away.

Three optional fields shape how it reads:

Your workspace already has IT Support, HR, Finance and Facilities groups,

so this is usually a switch rather than any setup. Nothing appears on any portal until you

turn a group on, so the change is yours to make department by department.

2. What the employee sees

The portal home keeps its existing cards — Report an issue, Request a service,

knowledge base search — and gains a second row underneath: Ask a team directly, with

one card per department you've enabled.

Picking a department opens that department's own form, not the IT one. It asks what

the request is about — from the topics you set up in step 3 — and then for a line, the

details, and any files. There's no service catalog and no ticket category, because those

belong to IT's request types.

The department is fixed at the top of the form, with a Change link back for someone

who picked the wrong team.

Employees only ever see the departments you've enabled. A group that isn't shown on the

portal can't be requested from it — including by someone editing the address bar.

Changing IT's service catalog, categories or custom fields

has no effect on what HR's form asks, and turning IT's request types off doesn't hide

your department cards.

3. What each department handles

Give a department a short list of what employees can come to it for, so they pick from

your words instead of guessing.

In the same group, under On the employee portal, use What HR handles → Add

topic. A topic is a name — "Payslip correction", "Leave balance", "New starter

paperwork" — and optionally a line of help text underneath it. Drag them into the order

you want with the arrows; that's the order employees see.

Five or six topics per department is usually plenty. They're the department's own list:

HR's topics are invisible to Finance, and none of them touch IT's service catalog.

The employee's choice lands on the ticket as its subcategory, so you can filter and

report on it, and assignment rules can match it —

useful for sending "Payslip correction" straight to one person in the team.

Removing a topic takes it off the portal and leaves every ticket already filed under

it alone, still showing what it was raised for. Removed topics stay in Settings so you can

restore one.

You don't have to add any. A department with no topics gets a form that asks for a line

and the details, which is often the right shape for Facilities.

4. Department ticket numbers

A department can also number its own tickets. Set a ticket prefix on the same group —

This works however the ticket arrived. A request raised from HR's portal card, mail

forwarded to HR's address, and a ticket QueAssist routes to HR all end up numbered HR-….

Each prefix keeps its own sequence, so HR-1001 and INC-1001 sit side by side in the

same workspace without clashing.

A ticket number never changes once you have it. If HR-1001 turns out to be an IT

problem and an agent moves it to IT Support, it stays HR-1001 — the number records where

a request started, and the ticket's Group field always shows who owns it now. That

matters because the number is in the subject line of the email your colleague already

received, and it's how their replies find their way back to the right ticket.

Two things to know before you set one:

• •The number stops telling you the ticket type. Without a department prefix, INC-1001 is an incident and REQ-1001 a service request. HR-1001 could be either — the Type field is where you look instead.

• •It's per department, not per workspace. The prefix under Settings → Ticket numbering still applies to every ticket in the workspace. Department numbering is set on the group.

A few prefixes are refused, because they'd merge two sets of numbers into one:

already on every ticket; and no two groups can share a prefix.

Leave the field blank — as it is by default — and the group uses your normal workspace

numbering. Existing tickets are never renumbered.

5. What the employee picked is where it goes

A request sent to HR from the portal stays with HR. Your

assignment rules can still set who in the team it

goes to and how urgent it is, but they won't move it to another team — the card promised

it goes straight to HR, so it does.

This is the one place a portal card and a

department mailbox behave differently: for mail, a rule

still wins, because an address says where the mail landed rather than who chose it.

6. Common questions

Do I have to use this?

No. Every group starts hidden from the portal, and a workspace that shows none behaves

exactly as it did before.

Can employees pick a team they're not part of?

Yes — that's the point. An employee isn't an agent; they're asking HR for something, not

joining HR. What they can't do is see the resulting ticket queue.

Does this work with group-based visibility?

Yes, and they pair well. The group is set the moment the ticket is created, so with

group-based visibility on there's no window where an

HR request sits where the wrong agents can read it.

Should I set a prefix on every group?

Only where the numbering means something to the people using it. A workspace-wide

departments talk about their tickets separately.

What if I turn a department's card off later?

Its existing tickets are untouched — same group, same numbers. Only the portal card

disappears, and new requests go back to being routed by QueAssist and your rules.

Can a department have both a mailbox and a portal card?

Yes, and that's the usual setup — see Department Mailboxes.

They're the two ways work reaches a team, and both are switched on from the same group.