How a roofing contractor replaced its Visio org chart with Orgline

The org chart lived in a Visio file on a shared drive. It was accurate on the day it was drawn and slightly wrong every day after. Crews changed, foremen moved between divisions, and the file was only opened when someone new asked "who do I call about this?"

The roster itself was never the problem — payroll already had every person, title, department and location in one place. The problem was that nothing connected the payroll export to the picture on the wall.

The workflow is now a single file. Payroll exports a CSV, the CSV is uploaded as-is, and the import runs in two passes: people first, reporting lines second. Nothing has to be sorted top-down and nothing has to be cleaned up beforehand.

The manager column is the only field that gets attention. Where it holds a manager's email, the line resolves exactly, even when two field techs share a first and last name. Anything that does not resolve shows up in the import report as a clickable fix, rather than silently dropping a person off the chart. See the CSV import guide for the exact column rules.

The structure is worth describing because it is typical of the trades and atypical for org chart software: about 58 people across 34 distinct job titles, five levels from owner to crew, and three separate entry points into the business rather than one clean root — the leadership group, the field operation, and the sales and project-management side.

Only 15 of those people manage anyone. Average span of control is under four, but the largest single team is 13 direct reports — a field supervisor with a wide, flat crew under them. Roughly 57 of the roles also carry a written job description, so the chart doubles as the place people look up what a role is actually responsible for.

A construction org chart is wide, not deep: a handful of division leads, then foremen, then crews that are large and shallow. Tools built for a corporate hierarchy render that as a mile-wide diagram that nobody can read on a phone in a truck.

Multiple roots matter too. The leadership view, the full-company view and the sales/PM view are three saved charts over one roster, not three files that drift apart.

On a small screen the chart falls back to a collapsible outline, so a crew member can drill from their division to their foreman to the office contact in three taps. Full-page zoom, pan, and PNG, PDF and SVG export are there for the office wall version.

Re-importing the same export updates people rather than duplicating them, so a monthly refresh takes about as long as the download from payroll. Before an import runs, a snapshot of the previous roster is stored, so a bad file can be rolled back in one click instead of being manually unpicked.

Employee records live in a single workspace that only invited members can open. A public read-only link is something an admin creates deliberately, per chart, and can revoke at any time — and contact details can be hidden on that link so a shared chart shows structure without publishing phone numbers or emails.

That is also why this page is anonymized: no real names, photos, contact details or reporting lines from the company appear anywhere on the public site. The chart in the live demo is a fictional roster built to match the same structure. You can download that fictional 58-person contractor roster (CSV) and import it into your own free workspace to see how a crew-based chart renders before you upload anything real.