Maintaining the seniority list

Who can use the Seniority List

Opening the Seniority List page requires an administrator or Regional VP (RVP) account. Anyone else sees an ACCESS DENIED notice. Viewing the list of members missing a priority number needs the viewSeniority capability, which administrators and RVPs usually have.

Assigning priority numbers, exporting, and bulk importing all need the editSeniority capability, which is typically limited to administrators. If you can open the page but lack it, those actions return a permission error in a red banner near the top.

Administrators work with every member. Everyone else only sees members in the branches they are allowed to view, so an RVP sees their own region. If your union does not keep formal seniority lists, this feature may be turned off on your deployment, so contact your system administrator.

How the ordering works

Two values together decide a member's place on the list. The seniority date (the Union Seniority Date, or the Seniority Date if that is empty) is the primary sort, and an earlier date always means higher seniority.

A priority number is a small whole number (1, 2, 3, and so on) that breaks ties between members who share the exact same seniority date. Priority 1 is the most senior within that date group. The numbering restarts at 1 for each distinct date, so it is not a single union-wide rank.

The full sort order is seniority date first, then priority number within the date, then last name and first name. A member with no number yet still has a seniority date, they simply have no defined order among same-date colleagues until a number is assigned.

Finding members missing a number

The Missing Priority List at the bottom of the page shows every member in your scope who has no priority number yet. Only members in active-type statuses, including leave-type statuses, appear here, so terminated and inactive members are filtered out.

Each row shows the name, branch and unit, and the seniority date on the right (rows with no date show a dash). The list is sorted by seniority date, oldest first, then by name. Long lists are capped at 250 rows on screen with a note showing the total, but exports always include everyone.

A status line summarizes how many members are missing numbers and how many months are available for assignment. Note that this list ignores the exclude-from-seniority flag, so an excluded member with an active status can still show here. That is harmless, since excluded members are dropped at export time.

1. 1Open the Seniority List page as an administrator or RVP.
2. 2Read the status line for the total missing and the months available.
3. 3Type in Search members to filter by name, branch, or unit (accents are ignored).
4. 4Click any row to jump to that member's profile in Members.
5. 5Click Refresh List at any time to reload the data.

Assigning priority numbers by month

This is the routine workflow, usually run monthly. In the Assign Priority Numbers by Month card, the Select Month dropdown lists eligible months, each showing how long ago it was and how many missing-priority members have a date in that month. The oldest available month is pre-selected.

Only months more than three months in the past are offered, which lets late corrections settle before numbers are locked in. Within the chosen month, members are grouped by their exact seniority date, and each group is ordered by a deterministic random shuffle seeded from the date itself. That produces a fair, repeatable tie-break, the same order every time, no matter who runs it. The assignment only ever fills numbers that are currently empty and never overwrites a number someone already has.

1. 1Open the Select Month dropdown and pick a month (the oldest is pre-selected).
2. 2Click Assign Priority Numbers to build a preview (nothing is saved yet).
3. 3In the Assign Priority Preview dialog, review each member's name, branch, date, and proposed priority number.
4. 4Click Apply Priority Numbers to save the whole batch in one step.
5. 5Or click Cancel, the X, or outside the dialog to back out without saving.

Exporting the full list

Three buttons at the top right download the complete list, and each needs the editSeniority capability. Export CSV produces plain spreadsheet text that opens accented names correctly in Excel. Export Excel produces an xlsx workbook with a single Seniority sheet, sized columns, and an autofilter on the header row. Export PDF produces a print-ready landscape document with bilingual column headers, an as-of date, repeated headers on every page, and page footers.

While an export runs, the button shows Exporting, all three are disabled, and a progress bar appears with a time estimate. The file downloads on its own. Members come out sorted with those who have a priority number first (by date, then priority, then name), followed by members still missing a number. Members with the exclude-from-seniority toggle on, and members in an inactive status, are left out of every export.

1. 1Finish assigning numbers for the months you intend to process.
2. 2Click Export CSV, Export Excel, or Export PDF at the top right.
3. 3Wait for the progress bar to finish; the file downloads automatically.
4. 4Share or post the exported list to your membership.

Correcting a number or excluding a member

To fix a single number, open the member's profile in Members and edit the Priority Number field in the Union section. If a date itself was wrong, fix Union Seniority Date (or Seniority Date). Remember the date, not the number, is the primary sort. The app does not renumber the rest of a date group when you hand-edit one member, so check the others sharing that date and adjust them to keep the sequence consistent.

To keep someone off the list entirely, such as an emeritus or honorary member, open their profile and flip the switch in the Seniority section. Its label reads Included in Seniority list or Not included in seniority list. The flag does not delete any data, so the dates and any priority number stay on the profile, and turning the switch back on restores the member to the next export.

Profile edits are recorded in the member's Changelog, giving an audit trail for individual corrections. If a whole month was assigned from bad data, correct the dates, clear the affected numbers on the profiles, and re-run the monthly assignment, and the deterministic shuffle will reproduce a consistent order.

1. 1Open the member's profile in Members.
2. 2Edit the Priority Number field in the Union section, or fix the seniority date if it was wrong.
3. 3Adjust other members sharing the same date so the sequence stays consistent.
4. 4To exclude a member, flip the switch in the Seniority section of their profile.

Bulk importing a seniority list

When you need to load many priority numbers at once, such as migrating an existing list into the app, a bulk import is available. It needs the editSeniority capability and follows the same safety model as the monthly assignment: a preview step that matches your file against your members, then a separate commit that writes the numbers. The current version does not put an upload button on the Seniority page, so it is run by an administrator as a back-office operation. If you have a seniority spreadsheet to load, contact your system administrator.

The file is a CSV with a header row, and column headers are matched flexibly, so capitalization and punctuation do not matter. Last Name, First Name, Seniority Date, and Priority are required. Region, Branch (or Section), and Unit are optional and help narrow ambiguous name matches. A file missing a required column is rejected with Missing required columns, and an empty file with CSV is empty.

Each row is matched to members by name, then narrowed by branch, unit, and seniority date when several people share a name. The preview sorts rows into Matched (one member found, the number will be applied on commit), Unmatched (no member found, so fix the spelling or add the member and re-import), and Conflicts (more than one member still fits, so these are not committed until you resolve them). It also reports counts. Committed numbers overwrite any existing number for those members, so a corrected re-import is the natural way to fix a bad load.