An HR system will export everyone it holds, which is both the good news and the problem: the file has forty columns, three of which draw a chart and the rest of which are payroll and leave data you should not be copying into a directory anyway. Building the chart from that export is a mapping job you do once and then repeat monthly in a minute. This page is that mapping: which columns to take, why the manager key matters more than the manager's name, which rows to drop before you import, and the one thing no HR export contains that will make the finished chart wrong.
Take three columns and refuse the rest
Employee identifier, manager identifier and display name draw the chart. Title, department and location make it readable. Everything else in the export, salary, leave balances, dates of birth, emergency contacts, belongs in the HR system and nowhere else, and copying it into a directory creates a second place a payroll figure can leak from. Map the six you need and leave the other thirty-four in the file.
Match on the identifier, never on the name
Manager columns that hold a name break the first time two people share one, somebody changes their surname, or an export writes surname first. The identifier or work email is stable, so map the manager column to that and let the display name be a label. On a 140-person import this is the difference between six broken rows and none, and it is a five-minute decision that pays for itself every month.
Drop the rows that are not people on the chart
Leavers with a past leaving date, unfilled requisitions that export as empty boxes, and duplicate records for people who moved department mid-year. All three produce boxes nobody recognises. Filter them at import rather than deleting them afterwards, so next month's export produces the same chart without the same cleanup.
Questions people ask about create organization chart
How often should we re-import?
Monthly is enough for most companies, or after any month with several joiners. The chart between imports is only as current as the last one, which is why joiners and leavers are usually recorded directly as well.
What does the export never contain?
Dotted lines. No HR system holds the project lead, the shared service or the functional boss, so those relationships are entered once by a person who knows the company and then kept.
Can we import from a directory service instead?
Yes, if it holds a manager attribute; the same mapping applies and the identifier is usually cleaner. The rule does not change: identifier for the line, name for the label.