Tags, aliases, and placeholders

Three small features on the staff record do a lot of quiet work: tags keep your team organized, aliases keep timetable imports matching the right people, and placeholders are the staff an import creates when it meets a name it does not recognize. You will find tags and aliases together on the Tags & aliases tab of any staff member.

Tags are free labels you attach to people, such as Senior, Ballet, or Front desk. They group your team the way your studio actually thinks about it, so you can filter and find people quickly without changing anything about how they are paid. Add as many as are useful; a person can hold several.

Aliases solve a specific problem: the name on your timetable is rarely the exact name on the staff record. Your timetable might read S. Nguyen or Sarah N where InstructorHUB knows the person as Sarah Nguyen. Add those variations as aliases and the next import matches them to the right person automatically, instead of asking you to sort them out by hand every time. Each alias you save makes future imports cleaner, so it is worth adding one whenever you correct a match during an import.

Placeholders appear the other way around. When an import meets an instructor name that matches nobody on your roster and no alias, you can have it create a new staff member on the spot rather than lose the class. That new record is a placeholder: real enough to hold the classes, but missing the details you would normally set, such as employment type and rates. After an import, look for these new people and finish setting them up so their classes turn into correct pay. There is more on how matching works during an import in Import a timetable.

Together these three keep the link between your timetable and your team tidy. Aliases stop the same manual matching happening every period, placeholders make sure a new name never blocks an import, and tags keep the whole roster easy to navigate as it grows.