Departments and Categories

This guide will show you how to create and edit your departments and associated categories. 

Creating departments and categories allows you to set-up and organise your courses into a logical structure, which is then also used for registration. Filtering of courses and ensembles in various menus uses the department-category structure, as do the teacher salary and hour calculations. Information regarding department and categories can be used in reporting as well. The most immediate impact this will have when working in SpeedAdmin is assisting you in filtering your various course lists, particularly when working in functions such as the online registration (e.g. building your registration tree and course catalogue).

Before you start the set-up on SpeedAdmin, decide the most logical way to structure your categories - it should be what works best and makes the most sense for your music service.

The most common structure in the UK is by tuition categories and uses only one department, 'Music Service'. The different course categories are then added to this one department. 

Your categories will most likely reflect the different types of tuition/provision you offer, e.g. in school tuition, Music Centre tuition, online ensembles etc. It may be helpful to consider the different categories of tuition used in data returns and use this as a basis for your category structure:

Creating Departments and Categories (Settings > Department & Category)

When entering the department & category section you will see the default SpeedAdmin structure:

You can select ‘Edit’ to change the name and colour of the existing department.

Creating a new Department 

1. Select the free field in the department column below the existing entry and set the name for the department.
2. Select a colour.
3. Select which order the department should have in the listing.
4. Select "Insert" to save the department.

(Once saved, you can also then ‘Edit’ and choose a Global department if you have two or more separate SpeedAdmin databases and you wish to link the departments for waiting list synchronisation.)

Example of several departments - this is useful if you have a multi-school category set-up and need to create courses for "School", "Music Hub" and "Music Centre":

Creating categories

1. Select the drop-down arrow next to your department name to open the category list.
2. Enter the category name in the empty Category field.
3. Select the Department/category manager (this is optional - the user profile must be already registered in SpeedAdmin).
4. Select which order the category should have in the listing.
5. Select insert to save the category

Once you have created your department and category structure, you will be able to select where to place your courses when creating these on the course data card. You can find out more about this in our Courses guide.

Your department and category structure will also be visible in your Registration set-up. Under Registrable Courses, you will see that your courses are grouped into their designated categories, enabling you to filter and manage registration for these categories as a whole, as well as by the individual courses. You can find out more about this in our Registration guides.