Line Managers and Supervisors

Purpose: This article explains the two manager fields in Administrate: the Line Manager on a Job Role and the Supervisor on a Contact. It covers how they differ, how to populate each one, and how to build manager-based workflows such as reporting on a team's training or letting managers register their people.

These two fields are easy to confuse because parts of the platform label them similarly, but they model different relationships and should not be treated as interchangeable.

Contents

• Overview
• What is a Line Manager?
• What is a Supervisor?
• Line Manager vs Supervisor
• When to use these fields
• Setting these fields
• What these fields do and don't do
• Manager workflows: monitoring and registering learners
• Best practices

Overview

Administrate stores two distinct manager relationships:

• A Line Manager is set on a Job Role within a contact's account membership. It records who manages the contact in the context of that role, and it can point at any contact. This is the right field for representing employee-to-manager structures in your learner population.
• A Supervisor is set on the Contact record itself and is restricted to staff: the supervisor you select must be a staff contact. It exists to model reporting lines within your own training team.

Key principle: both fields are informational. They describe your organizational structure and can be used in reporting, but neither field automatically drives approvals, communications, registrations, or portal access. Manager-driven workflows are configured separately; see Manager workflows.

What is a Line Manager?

The Line Manager field lives on the Job Role attached to a contact's account membership. Because it is set per role, a contact could in principle have different line managers for different roles or accounts.

• Any contact can be selected as a line manager.
• The line manager is displayed in the Job Roles table on the contact record.
• The relationship is available in the Reporting Engine: contact reports can traverse the line manager relation, so you can build reports grouped by manager, such as a report of all learners and their training status per line manager.

Use Line Manager when you are modelling your customers' or learners' org structure: who manages whom inside the accounts you train.

What is a Supervisor?

The Supervisor field lives on the contact record itself, and the contact you select as supervisor must be a staff contact. Attempting to set a non-staff contact as a supervisor is rejected.

• It is edited on the contact record for staff contacts, where the field is labelled Line Manager (see the note below).
• Changes to the supervisor are recorded in the contact's audit log.
• In the Reporting Engine the relationship appears as Line Manager Supervisor.

Use Supervisor when you are modelling reporting lines within your own training operation, such as which team lead an instructor or administrator reports to.

Naming note: on the staff contact details form, the field that edits the Supervisor relationship is labelled "Line Manager", and in reporting it appears as "Line Manager Supervisor". Despite the label, this is the contact-level Supervisor field, not the Job Role Line Manager described above. When in doubt: the field on the contact form is the Supervisor; the field on a Job Role is the Line Manager.

Line Manager vs Supervisor

When to use these fields

Because neither field drives automation, their value comes from reporting, lookup, and keeping your organizational model accurate. Populate them when one of these scenarios applies.

Use Line Manager when:

• You report on training by manager. The Reporting Engine can traverse the line manager relation, so you can build reports of completions, registrations, or overdue training grouped by each learner's manager. This is a common requirement in regulated and compliance-driven environments.
• You need to know who to contact about a learner. When training needs chasing or escalating, the line manager on the learner's job role tells your team who is responsible, without a trip to an external HR system.
• You mirror an HR system. If contacts are synced in from an HR or CRM platform, carrying the manager relationship keeps Administrate's picture of the organization consistent with the source of truth for reports and integrations.
• You are planning manager access to the Booking Portal. Coordinator access is configured by account rather than by this field, but recorded line managers tell you which contacts should be Coordinators and whether your account structure reflects real teams.
• A contact has different managers in different roles. Because the field lives on the Job Role, a contractor or dual-role contact can hold a different line manager per role or account.

Use Supervisor when:

• You report on your own training team. Staff rosters, instructor workload, or utilization grouped by team lead use the Line Manager Supervisor relation in reporting.
• You need staff reporting lines to be traceable. Supervisor changes are recorded in the contact audit log, giving you a history of internal reorganizations.

If none of these apply, leave both fields empty. Do not populate a field just because an import column exists for it. Incorrect organizational data produces confidently wrong reports, which is worse than leaving the fields blank.

Setting these fields

Line Manager: open the contact record, go to the contact's Accounts area, then add or edit a Job Role and select the Line Manager.

Supervisor: open a staff contact's record and edit the field labelled Line Manager in the contact details (this is the Supervisor relationship; see the naming note above). The contact you select must also be a staff contact.

Bulk loading: use the Data Import tool as normal. The fields follow the record structure: Supervisor Id appears on the Contact imports (staff contacts only), while Line Manager appears on the Membership imports, since it belongs to the Job Role. To load a learner population with its management structure, import the contacts first, then run a Membership import to create the job roles with their line managers. Do not put learners' managers in the Supervisor Id column; those rows are rejected unless the manager is a staff contact.

API: both fields are available through the GraphQL API on the contact and job role mutations respectively; see the developer documentation for the schema reference.

What these fields do and don't do

Both fields do:

• appear on the relevant records in the TMS,
• support filtering and traversal in the Reporting Engine,
• record changes in the audit trail (Supervisor).

Neither field does:

• route approvals or booking workflows to the manager,
• add the manager as a communication recipient,
• grant the manager visibility of their team in any portal,
• enrol or register anyone automatically.

If you were expecting a manager field to produce one of those behaviours, configure the corresponding feature instead: communication audiences are set on templates and triggers, and manager access to learners is granted through the Booking Portal, described next.

Manager workflows: monitoring and registering learners

A common requirement is that managers can see their employees' training status and register them onto courses or learning paths. This is delivered by the Booking Portal, not by the manager fields:

1. Assign each manager as a Coordinator on your Booking Portal.
2. Coordinators can then view and manage the learners in the accounts they have been given access to, book them onto training, and monitor their bookings.

Note that Coordinator access is scoped by account, not by the Line Manager field: a Coordinator manages the learners of the accounts they are assigned to. If managers should only see their own team, structure the relevant accounts (or use separate portals) so that each Coordinator's account access matches their team.

For reporting-based monitoring, such as a periodic report of training status grouped by manager, use the Line Manager relation in the Reporting Engine.

Best practices

• Model learner org structures with Line Manager on Job Roles, not the Supervisor field. Supervisor is restricted to staff and will reject learner contacts.
• Load in two passes. Import contacts first, then run a Membership import to create job roles with their line managers. Leave the contact import's Supervisor Id column blank unless you are genuinely loading staff reporting lines.
• Don't rely on either field for automation. Pair the data (Line Manager, for reporting) with the workflow (Booking Portal Coordinators, for manager access) to deliver manager use cases.
• Watch the labels. A field labelled "Line Manager" on the contact form is the staff-only Supervisor; the Line Manager that supports learner reporting lives on the Job Role.