Groups

A group sits above several companies that belong to the same owner. Each company keeps its own people, its own customers and its own deals, and none of them can see another. What the group adds is one place above them all: totals across every company, reports that span them, and a way to set them all up the same way without doing the work over and over.

A group is not a company. It holds no customers, no deals and no invoices of its own. It holds a list of the companies it covers and a list of the people who may look at them.

Three ways to be in a group

Owner. Runs the group, covers every company, and can open any of them. Only an owner can make someone else an owner.

Administrator. Manages the group's people and settings, sets the standards, and can open the companies they cover. An administrator can be limited to some of the companies rather than all: a regional director over six of forty brands is exactly that.

Analyst. Sees the group's totals and reports and nothing else. An analyst can never open an individual company, so never sees a single customer, deal or person inside one.

What the group can and cannot do for itself

The group runs itself: adding and removing its own people, deciding who covers which companies, renaming a company within the group, setting the group's reporting currency, and pushing standards out to the companies.

One thing is deliberately not self-service: attaching a company to a group. Ask us and we will do it. The reason is that a group administrator holds administrator rights inside every company they cover, so being able to attach any company would be a way to grant yourself access to somebody else's business.

Reading across companies that bill in different currencies

By default every company's money stays in its own currency and the group does not add them together, because a total that mixes currencies looks authoritative and is wrong. Set a group currency and every figure is converted into it at the day's rate. If we cannot get a rate for one of your currencies, that money is left out of the total and the page says so rather than quietly counting it as if it were one to one.

Who opened what

Whenever someone from the group opens one of the companies, that is recorded and the group can see it. The record belongs to the group, and is deliberately not shown inside the company: head office overseeing a business it owns is not an event that business polices.