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Managing Personnel Ranks

Ranks help organize your roster and define which members a compliance program applies to. For example, you can use ranks to limit an Emergency Medical Program Audit to medically trained volunteers and staff.

Add a rank

  1. Go to Settings > Ranks.
  2. Enter the title in New rank name.
  3. Select Add.

You can create the titles that match your department's structure, such as Firefighter, Paramedic, EMR, District Chief, or K9 SAR. New ranks are added to the bottom of the list — drag them into place as described below.

Put the ranks in order

The order of the rank list in Settings > Ranks is the order ranks appear everywhere else in Command Established: rank filters on the roster, the rank groups in personnel pickers, the rank options on compliance programs and elections, and a member's additional rank endorsements. Most departments arrange it by seniority, chief officers first.

  1. Go to Settings > Ranks.
  2. Drag a rank by the handle to its left, or focus the handle and use the arrow keys.
  3. The new order saves as soon as you drop the rank — there is nothing else to confirm.

Assign a rank to a member

  1. Open the member's personnel record.
  2. Open the department information section.
  3. Choose the member's primary rank and save the record.

A member can also hold additional ranks — see Give a member more than one rank.

The member is then included whenever a compliance program is limited to that rank. Learn how to set those filters in Compliance Programs.

Use ranks to limit a compliance program

When creating or editing a compliance program, find Who does this apply to? and select the ranks that should be evaluated. Leave ranks unselected when the program should apply to every rank.

For an EMS audit, select the medical ranks your department uses. The live member count confirms who will be included before you save the program.

Give a member more than one rank

A member has one primary rank and can hold any number of additional rank endorsements. Use endorsements when someone holds more than one designation — the firefighter who also runs as a paramedic, or the district chief who is still an EMR.

  1. Open the member's personnel record.
  2. Open the department information section and select Edit.
  3. Confirm the Primary rank, then check each rank under Additional rank endorsements.
  4. Save the record.

Compliance programs and ISO reporting evaluate every rank a member holds, so a Firefighter/Paramedic is picked up by a program filtered to Firefighter and by one filtered to Paramedic. There is no need for a combined rank title such as Firefighter/Paramedic.

Endorsements are listed in the order of your department's rank list, so they read the same way on every record. The primary rank is what the rest of the app displays and reports on — payroll and staffing still read the single primary rank, not the endorsements.

If you already created combined rank titles as a workaround, you can move those members to a primary rank plus endorsements and retire the combined title. Update any compliance program, officer bonus requirement, or ISO training category that filters on the combined rank before deleting it — see Remove a rank below.

Remove a rank

You can delete a rank in Settings > Ranks only after no personnel are assigned to it, as a primary rank or as an endorsement. Reassign each affected member first, then delete the unused rank. This prevents a personnel record from being left without a rank.

Two things to check before you delete:

  • Keep at least one rank. A department's rank list cannot be saved empty, so removing the last remaining rank is rejected even when nobody is assigned to it. Add the replacement rank first, then delete the old one.
  • Update anything that filters by the rank. Deleting a rank does not update the compliance programs, officer bonus requirements, or ISO training categories that filtered on it — update those first: replace the old rank in every compliance program's Who does this apply to? filter, in every officer bonus requirement's rank list, and in any ISO training category scoped to that rank. If you skip this, the members you just reassigned silently drop out of that program's dashboard, CSV export, and point calculations.

Note: Existing rank titles cannot currently be renamed in place. Add the corrected title, reassign the affected personnel, update every compliance filter that pointed at the old title as described above, then remove the old, unused title.