Changing many people at once

Settings → Bulk actions applies one change to many records at once. It is for the jobs that are unreasonable one at a time — setting a rate across a team, tagging everyone from an agency, archiving people who have left.

Available to owners and administrators.

Choosing what to change

Pick an action first. The list covers people, projects, clients and invoices — rates and capacity, employee or contractor, adding to or removing from a group, assigning people to projects, archiving and reactivating, and marking invoices sent.

Choosing who it applies to

Every action gives you a list with checkboxes and three ways to narrow it:

• Search by name. Select all then applies to whatever matches, and tells you how many that is.
• Filter by group, if you have any.
• Filter by current designation — employees or contractors.

The filters do slightly different things, deliberately. Searching keeps your selection, so you can build a set across several searches; if anybody you have selected is hidden by what you have typed, the screen tells you they are still included. Changing a group or designation filter clears the selection, because those change which people are eligible at all rather than only which are visible.

A worked example

"Set everyone to employee except the people already marked as contractors."

1. Choose Set employee or contractor
2. Filter by current designation → Employees only
3. Select all
4. Set everybody selected to Employee, and run

The contractors are not in the list, so there is no way to overwrite them.

Afterwards

Every run is recorded. View history at the top of the page shows what was done, by whom, to how many records. Actions started elsewhere — assigning a role from a client page, for instance — appear there too.

Nothing here is a delete. Archiving is reversible, group changes leave the group and everybody else alone, and a designation is a label rather than a permission.

What a designation does and does not do

Employee and contractor is a label. It does not change what somebody can do, their rates, or how their time is approved. If you want to record which agency a contractor belongs to, use a group — see Groups. Somebody can be a contractor and in a group called "MCF" at the same time; the two facts are independent.