The people model in SquadBear
Where a person's data lives once they're in — profile, custom fields, teams and the org chart
This is a map of where a person's data lives after they've joined — for getting someone into SquadBear in the first place, see Invite your team.
Why it's split up this way
Not every fact about a person is the same kind of fact. Some are structured and the product computes with them (a work schedule, a team). Some are workspace-specific and only you know you need them (a T-shirt size, a badge number). Some are just history (when someone joined, when their title changed). SquadBear keeps these apart, so adding a field your workspace needs never means waiting on a schema change.
The profile
Every person has a profile with five tabs: Overview (contact info, teams, manager, holiday calendar, entitlements, emergency contacts, custom-field values, and read-only employment history), Documents (their files), Checklists (onboarding/offboarding progress), Schedule (their Work Schedule — model, working days, hours, FTE — plus its history), and, for admins only, Data rights (export and erase this person's data — see Data protection and GDPR).
Custom fields
Admins define the fields at Admin → Workspace → Documents & data → Custom fields:
text, number, date, select, or boolean, grouped into a Personal, Job, or Other section.
A workspace can define up to 50, and a field's key can't be renamed once set — only
relabeled. Values fill in per person on their profile's Overview tab, under "Additional
details." An agent can read every definition with list_field_defs and write values
with update_employee_fields.
Contacts and employment history
Emergency contacts are a dedicated, structured record — name, relation, phone, an optional email — capped at three per person, not a custom field. Employment history isn't a table you fill in either: it's a read-only timeline built from the audit log (hire, invitation accepted, profile edits, schedule changes, country changes), shown to admins on the Overview tab so nobody has to reconstruct "when did this change" by hand.
Teams and the org chart
A team's manager counts as a member — they show up in the member list and the count,
badged as manager, not floating above it as a separate role. Reassigning the manager
adds the new one to membership automatically; it doesn't remove the person stepping
down. Team pages live at People → Teams; the whole company's manager-report tree is
its own page at People → Org chart, and the same tree is available to a connected
agent as get_org_chart.
Offboarding
The action lives on the list, not the profile: People → Manage people → Offboard next to the person's row. Confirming it cancels their future approved leave (refunding the balance), reassigns any approvals waiting on them to their manager, and cancels their own unfinished onboarding checklist. It does not start an offboarding checklist automatically — that's a deliberate, separate action ("Start checklist" on the person's Checklists tab), so the tasks it creates land on someone who's still around to see them. See Checklists for how those run.
Worked example
Northlake is ordering hoodies for the next all-hands and wants to track sizes. Marta adds
a field at Admin → Workspace → Documents & data → Custom fields: key tshirt_size, type
select, options S/M/L/XL, section "Other." It appears immediately on every profile's
Overview tab under Additional details — no migration, no ticket to engineering — and
each person (or Marta, on their behalf) fills in their own value.