Organizations are usually composed of smaller units, working in tandem with each other. Consider a small, family-owned cafe: it might be composed of a kitchen, a dining area, and a cash register. Now consider a multinational manufacturing conglomerate; it might be composed of a corporate headquarters, several factories, and multiple sales outlets.

Most organizations, no matter how big or small, operate from multiple work locations. For this reason, Zoho One now gives you the ability to digitally manage those work locations from your admin panel. You can see the dedicated section for work locations in your admin panel's Organization tab. Adding and setting the work locations of your users makes it easier to manage them. Let's take a look at a few sample use cases.

Imagine your organization has a sales outlet, and you need to assign Zoho Inventory to all employees working in the sales outlet. Sure, you could create a Department in Zoho One for the sales team and assign the Inventory app to it, but this wouldn't grant access to all the necessary employees working in the outlet. For example, they may be warehouse monitors, cashiers, or auditors who still need access to Zoho Inventory. In such a case, you can assign Inventory to all users in the outlet using Conditional Assignment— just set the criteria to "Work Location is Sales Outlet".

Now, let's imagine your sales team needs to use Zoho Inventory only from the outlet. Here, you can use departments and assign a security policy to the department that allows access only when the employees are using particular IP addresses to sign in. However, setting users' work locations can come in handy here as well. When you have a large number of employees, manually searching and adding them to different departments can be time-consuming. If you set the work locations of all your employees during onboarding, you can use Zoho One's new Advanced Filter to get a list of employees belonging to the outlet and easily create a department with those users.

Speaking of onboarding, adding work locations to your organization before onboarding new hires can speed up the process. When adding a user to Zoho One, you will have to fill out ten or more fields to complete the employee's profile. However, choosing a work location from the dropdown menu automatically fills in the employee's locale info.

This simple step can save you a surprising amount of time once you start onboarding a lot of users.

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These examples merely scratch the surface when it comes to the usefulness of work locations. Based on the size of your organization and the strength of your workforce, you can come up with countless helpful ways to use work locations side-by-side with other features. 

Want to share some of your time-saving tips that may help other Zoho One users? Share them in the comments below, and let's get the conversation started!