Reference data & catalogs
The admin-controlled lists every dropdown in Kaizen draws from — leave types and plans, holidays, categories, sources, skills, and asset categories.
What you can do here
- Maintain the lists that populate dropdowns across Kaizen.
- Add entries, edit them, and retire the ones no longer used.
These are small screens with large consequences: an empty catalog here is an unusable form somewhere else.
Where they live
Most of these live in the Admin area rather than having sidebar entries of their own. Open Admin and they're grouped by side of the business — People, Operations, Sales, and Admin — so leave types, leave plans, WFH policy, policy categories and KRA templates all sit together under People. Open any one of them and a tab strip appears above the page, so you can move between the catalogs on that side without going back.
Two are exceptions. Holidays has its own entry under People in the sidebar, and Inquiry Sources sits under Sales, beside the inquiries it feeds.
The catalogs
- Leave Types and Leave Plans — feed the leave form and everyone's annual balances.
- Holidays — feed the leave and attendance calendars.
- Ticket Categories — decide which team a support ticket reaches.
- Policy Categories — group published policies.
- Lead Sources and Inquiry Sources — record where opportunities come from.
- Skills — tag people, and drive the skills search when finding available resources.
- Asset Categories — classify equipment.
Adding and retiring entries
Open the catalog and use its add action — Add Leave Type, New Holiday, New Plan, and so on. Fill in the fields and save; the entry appears in the dropdown it feeds straight away.
To retire something, deactivate it rather than deleting it. Existing records keep pointing at it, history stays intact, and it simply stops being offered for new ones.
Leave plans deserve a mention
Leave Plans is the biggest of these. A plan defines the leave entitlement, and it's assigned to one or more business units — so different parts of the company can have different allowances without separate systems.
Plans also handle the year-end rollover, which is what carries balances into the new year.
Get the plan right before the year starts. Balances follow the plan, and correcting entitlements after people have started booking leave against them is unpleasant.
Holidays and the leave calculation
Holidays aren't only decoration on a calendar. Mandatory holidays inside a leave request aren't counted against the person's balance; optional holidays are.
So marking a holiday optional or mandatory directly changes what a day off costs an employee. It's the highest-consequence field in any of these catalogs.
Good to know
- An empty dropdown almost always means an empty catalog. If someone reports that they can't pick a leave type or a ticket category, check here first.
- Categories and sources are worth keeping short. Every extra option is a decision someone has to make, and long lists produce inconsistent data.
- Inquiry sources carry a signing secret and per-form defaults — those are covered with inquiries, since connecting a form is an inquiries job even though the list is a catalog like the rest of these.