Our Cohorts feature was conceived to help you organize your company on Sunlight in order to reflect your company's organizational structure in real life as closely as possible.

To access your cohort settings, please visit your Company’s profile by clicking on your company’s icon on the left-side menu, and then locate the tab labeled "Cohorts" under your settings.

Once you get on your cohort’s page, you will be able to see your already existing cohorts and to create new ones. To learn more about this, please visit our article “Setting up your cohorts”.

Cohort types are simply labels for your Cohorts. You can create as many Cohort types as you wish, and their names can be completely personalized: Team, Cost Center, Office, Region…whatever you decide best fits your organizational structure.

By default, you'll have three Cohort types, one labeled “Cohort”, one labeled "Manager" and one as “Team”.

Cohort type Cohort

The cohort type "Cohort", named “all”, includes by default every single member of your group.
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Cohort type Manager

This type of cohort will require a user to be assigned as the manager. This manager cannot be changed once given this permission, and this cohort cannot have multiple managers.

Managers can see the requests they’ll need to approve, and their cohort’s activity. To learn how to create this cohort please go to “Setting Up Your Cohort”. In addition to this, you can see how this permission works by reading our article “All about managers.”

If you're a company admin, you’ll be able to create different cohorts, and you can name them as you wish. These cohorts work a little different from a cohort type manager, in this case, you’ll be able to grant certain users you choose, two types of special permissions:

The user or users will be able to approve orders placed by the other members of the Cohort. They’ll also be able to see their cohort’s activity and requests. In this case, you can have multiple approvers.

The user or users will be able to see, add and remove users within their own cohort. They’ll also be able to see their cohort’s activity, but they’ll not see their requests.
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If you're a Company admin then, within your Company’s page, you can sort through various sections (“Activity,” “Requests,” “Analytics,” “Reports,” “Members”). There you can add a specific Cohort as a filter; in this way, you will be able to see the precise information you want about a cohort.
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Note: Admins will be given full access, but regular users will have to be members of a Cohort to access its information via these filter bars.

Let’s say you have a department for Human Resources, and they have one or two supervisors, if you want these supervisors to approve the department’s requests, you can create a cohort type team and give them permission for approval. Remember that you can change the cohort type to fit the way your company is structured.

In this case, let’s imagine that you have the same Human Resources department, but each person has a different manager; or that you have people from different departments, let’s say “Development” and “Human Resources”, and you want them to have the same approver/manager. In both cases, you could create cohorts type Manager. Remember that in this type of cohort you can only have one approver.

Another case would be if you have the two previous cases altogether. In this scenario, you can have cohorts type Team and type Manager at the same time.

You can create cohorts type teams if you want to filter information on their purchases, and there is no need for approvers. In this case, you can also create cohorts type managers that will work only to approve requests. For example, you can have a user called Chelsea in the Human Resources team, and Henry in the Development team, but they both share one Manager called Paul, this way you’d have two cohorts type team, and one type manager.

These are a few of our suggestions, but you can use our cohorts feature the way that better fits your company’s organization. To learn how to create cohorts for your company, please do not forget to go to our article “Setting Up your Cohort”.

Please do not hesitate to contact our support team via our live chat or by emailing us at support@sunlight.is.