Industry guide
Org charts for construction and field-service companies
Crew-based companies break the assumptions most org chart tools make: headcount moves seasonally, people work under a lead who is not their payroll manager, and half the workforce never opens a laptop.
Chart the crew, not the cost centre
Payroll groups technicians under a branch or a region. Day to day they answer to a crew lead or foreman. Chart the working relationship — the chart's job is to tell a new hire who to call, not to reconcile the general ledger.
Practically: put the foreman's email in each technician's manager column, and the branch manager's email in the foreman's.
Seasonal headcount and the monthly refresh
A roofing or landscaping roster can swing 40% between February and July. Rebuilding a diagram each season is what kills the habit. Export payroll monthly and re-import the same file — people are matched by email, so the chart updates rather than duplicating, and departures show up as drift you can review before applying.
Subcontractors and 1099 crews
Leave them off and the chart is wrong; mix them in silently and headcount reporting is wrong. Include them with an explicit title suffix — "Framing Sub (1099)" — or a department value of "Subcontractor", so they are visible and filterable without being counted as employees.
Multi-branch and safety reporting
Branches read best as parallel subtrees under an operations director, each with its own scheduler and crews. Safety and compliance almost always crosses those lines; record the management line on the chart and note the safety relationship in the person's title or department rather than inventing a second parent.
Make it usable in the truck
Most of the people who need the chart are looking at it on a phone between jobs. A shareable read-only link with search — no account, no app store — is what actually gets used. Orgline share links open on mobile as a collapsible outline instead of a chart you have to pinch across.
See a worked example: a 58-person roofing contractor, or start from the roster template.
Build the chart while the file is still open
Import your roster, fix the odd manager line, share a link. Free for up to 25 people — no card, no sales call.