Build your first model

This guide builds a model of an organization as it stands today — the usual starting point, because almost everything else in Resorcerer is a comparison against it.

Set aside twenty minutes. You can stop after step 3 and still have something useful.

The fast path: generate it from your people directory

If your people directory is already populated — whether added by hand or imported from a CSV — skip straight to a working model. From Browse Models, choose Create Model, pick Your people as the starting point, and Resorcerer builds units, one filled position per person, and reporting lines in one action. The dialog asks for the same name, summary, description, effective date and labels as a blank model, then walks through three decisions:

Units — what the model’s units are built from, and optionally which ones:
- By department — one unit per department, nested where a department head can be inferred. Pick specific departments to build only those.
- By manager — one unit per manager with direct reports, nested by the reporting chain. Pick specific managers to build only their organizations: each one brings their whole reporting tree.
- By groups — one unit per group that has someone in it, nested the way your groups are. Pick any number of groups to cover just their subtrees (leave it empty for every top-level group), and narrow them further by name or depth. You can also name the units from part of the group name, say Platform for a group called SG-Platform-Team, or, when you pick a single group, leave that group’s own unit out so the groups under it are the top level (see Groups in scope). You can also choose what happens to people who are in several groups: one slot in the deepest group, one slot shared by every unit, or one slot per unit (see Groups in scope).
- No units — positions only, each in no unit. Reporting lines are kept, so the org chart still works, and you build the units yourself.
People — your choice of units is also the first people filter: everyone the units have a place for gets a position (by department, people with a department; by manager, people with a manager or direct reports; by groups, people directly in one of those groups), and nobody else does. Resorcerer never invents a catch-all unit to hold the rest. On top of that you can narrow by department, reporting line, direct manager, role, level, location, company, group or title. The preview shows exactly how many people will be included, in how many units, and how many were left out, before you generate.
Live sync — tick Keep this model live and the new model stays current from then on: changes in your people directory arrive as reviewable proposals on it rather than leaving it to drift. The units and people you just chose become what it syncs from and who it watches, and you choose here which kinds of change are applied without review — see Keep a model live.

Positions carry each person’s role, level, location, and company; start and end dates are left for you to fill in. Reporting lines mirror each person’s manager.

Inactive people, those with a past end date and those the units have no place for are skipped and reported by name, so you can see at a glance who was left out and why.

This gets you straight to reviewing the result: check the unit tree and positions it created, adjust anything that needs a human eye (the department-nesting heuristic falls back to a flat root whenever it can’t confidently infer a hierarchy), then pick up below from step 6, giving it costs.

The rest of this guide covers building a model by hand, which is still the right approach if your people directory doesn’t exist yet, or if you want full control over the structure from the start.

Before you start

Two things are worth having in place, though neither is required:

Your people, added or imported. You can build the whole structure with vacant positions and fill them later.
Your attributes — roles, levels, locations, and companies, under Configuration in the sidebar. These describe positions, and without at least roles the breakdown views have little to say.

1. Create the model

From Browse Models, choose Create Model and give it a name. Use something that will still make sense next to five others — Current Org — FY26 beats Model 1.

Add a summary if you want a line of context in the list, and labels if you’re going to accumulate models and will want to filter them.

You land in the model’s Units view, which is empty.

2. Build the unit hierarchy

Create your top-level units first — the divisions or departments that sit at the root — then nest teams beneath them.

Add unit creates a root unit. Name it. To classify it as a Department, a Team or a Squad, edit the unit afterwards and add labels (create them first on the Labels page).
With a unit selected, add a child unit to nest one level down.
Repeat until the tree matches your organization.

Don’t agonize over it. Units can be dragged to a new parent at any time, and the tree takes their contents with them. The only move Resorcerer refuses is dropping a unit inside its own descendant.

3. Add positions

Select a unit and add slots to it. A slot is one position — one line of headcount.

For each, set as much as you know:

Role and level — what the position is. These do most of the work later, both in the breakdowns and in costing.
Location and company — where it sits and who employs it. The company’s contractor flag is what separates employees from contingent workers in reporting.
Units — a position can belong to more than one, for genuinely shared roles.

Leave them vacant for now. A model made entirely of vacant positions is already useful: it’s your target structure and its cost.

4. Put people in them

Assign people to the positions that are filled today, either from the slot itself or by working through a unit’s people panel, which can show everyone, only those already placed in this model, or only those not yet placed — the last being the useful one when you’re checking nobody’s been missed.

Anything you leave vacant is a vacancy, and Resorcerer will report and cost it as one. That’s usually what you want.

5. Draw the reporting lines

Set reports to on each position to point at the position it reports to. Do the managers first and work down, and the Org Chart view will fill in as you go.

Reporting is between positions, not people, so a vacant Head of Platform can already have reports. Resorcerer won’t let you create a loop.

6. Give it costs

If you haven’t yet, add cost profiles under Configuration. Start broad — one per role — then add more specific profiles where level, location, or employer changes the price.

Go back to the model’s Summary. You now have headcount, fill rate, and total cost, split between filled and vacant, rolled up through the unit tree.

If the Summary reports unmatched positions, those are positions no profile covers. Click through, see which combinations are missing, and add profiles until the count is zero. Until it is, your total is understated.

7. Protect it

Once the model reflects reality, mark it protected in its settings. Direct edits are now blocked, and the only way it changes is through a reviewed merge.

That’s what makes it safe to treat as the reference copy — and it’s the starting point for planning, since every proposal begins as a copy of it.

Analyse a model — what the model can now tell you.
Compare and merge — planning a change against it.
Planning over time — putting the model on a calendar.