The company structure in Bitrix24 (Alaio) is a tree of departments with supervisors that you set up once — and from then on it silently affects everything: who sees whose tasks, how reports are calculated, who receives an escalation. Half of all portals live with an "everyone in one department" structure — and lose the main prize: automation that relies on reporting lines. Let's walk through the setup, the hidden effects of the structure, and three scenarios where the org structure works inside business processes.
How to set up the structure: departments and supervisors
The section is Employees → Company structure. Departments are created with a button, nest inside each other with no depth limit, and each gets a supervisor and a parent department. An employee is linked to a department in their profile; one person can belong to several departments. Two hygiene rules. First: every department must have a supervisor — escalations, "my subordinates" reports, and "approve with supervisor" flows all hang on that person; a department without a supervisor is a hole in every one of those chains. Second: don't spawn departments for projects and temporary teams — that's what groups and projects are for; the structure should reflect real reporting lines.
What the structure affects without you noticing
Reporting lines in tasks: a supervisor sees their subordinates' tasks and gets reports on them — "theirs" is defined precisely by the structure. CRM permissions: access roles operate on the notions of "own department" and "subdepartment" — the filter "a rep only sees deals of their own department" works only if the departments are filled in honestly. Approvals: the built-in "approve with supervisor" action follows the structure, and if no supervisor is assigned, the approval hangs. Finally, the day-off and vacation automation in calendars also looks at the department. The symptom of a broken structure is always the same: "why did the approval go to the wrong person" and "why does a rep see someone else's deals".
Escalation: getting an employee's supervisor in a process
A classic: a task is overdue, an approval has been hanging for three days — the issue needs to go one level up. The stock designer only knows the "supervisor" inside its own approval action; in arbitrary logic there's no way to reach them. The Get employee manager robot returns any employee's direct supervisor based on the department structure — then the process assigns them a task, sends a notification, or adds them as an observer using the scenarios from the article on observers. The "responsible person → their supervisor" chain comes together in two steps and works for any employee, because it relies on the live structure, not an ID hardwired into the process.
Routing: an employee's department as a condition
The second building block is the Get employee department robot: given an employee ID, it returns their department. This turns the department into a process condition: a request from a wholesale-department rep goes down one branch, one from retail — down another; a purchase request from the production department gets its own approval limit. Without the robot, such forks are built by hand — as a list of employee IDs in a condition, which goes stale with the first staffing change. With the robot, the process reads the current structure on every run.
Distributing work inside a department
The third scenario is handing work out "to a department" rather than to a person: the Random employee from list or department robot picks a random active employee from the specified department and can exclude the current responsible person. Combined with routing, you get a complete pipeline: determine the department → pick a person in it → assign. How this applies to a stream of inquiries is covered in the article on leads, where the same robot distributes inquiries between reps.
Frequently asked questions
An employee is in two departments — whose supervisor comes back? The supervisor of the employee's primary department; for unambiguous results, keep key people in a single department. What does the robot return for a department supervisor? The supervisor of the parent department — the escalation climbs the tree instead of looping back to the same person. Is there built-in delegation for vacations? No, substitution is solved by the process: a "supervisor unavailable" condition and a backup approver. Does the structure affect counters and KPIs? Yes, a supervisor's task and sales reports are built from the subordinates defined by the structure.
In summary
The company structure is the foundation of automation: honest departments and assigned supervisors turn "raise it one level up" and "hand it to the right department" from manual actions into process rules. The robots for working with the structure — get the supervisor, the department, a random employee from a department — are in the Roboteka catalog, free to install from Bitrix24 Market. If the scenario you need isn't there, describe the task and we'll build the robot for free.