Set one company up, then copy it to the rest

If you own several companies you usually want them set up the same way, and doing that by hand in each one is the job nobody wants. A standard is how one company is already set up, saved once at the group and put into the others.

Save a standard

Open the group, go to Standards, and fill in the one line at the top: what you want to standardise, which company to copy it from, and what to call it.

You can standardise dashboards, roles and permissions, shared views, deal stages, support statuses, job statuses, job types, project types and project stages. Dashboards are the easiest place to start, because a dashboard carries nothing that only makes sense in the company it came from.

Saving a standard changes nothing anywhere. It only takes a copy.

See what would change, then do it

Choose Put this in companies, tick the companies, and choose what should happen where something is already set up:

• Only add what is missing leaves anything a company has already set up exactly as it is.
• Also replace what they already have overwrites their version with yours.

Then choose See what would change. You get a list, company by company, naming every single thing that would be added, replaced or left alone, and why. Only then does the button that actually makes the changes become available.

What a push will never do

It never deletes anything. If a company has a deal stage, a role or a dashboard that your standard does not include, it stays. You will see it listed as something that company has of its own. Removing settings from a company is always a separate, deliberate act inside that company.

This matters most for deal stages, because deals sit in them. If a company has a stage your standard does not have, and deals are in that stage, the preview says so and the stage is kept.

It never quietly overwrites. A company that has already set something up is skipped unless you deliberately chose to replace, and even then you saw the list first.

Things that cannot travel

A few things only make sense in the company they came from, and the preview tells you when it is leaving one out:

• A saved view filtered to one named person. That person does not work in the other company.
• A job type that points at a checklist. The checklist lives in the company you copied from, so the job type arrives without it and you set it there.
• Two things in the same standard called the same name. Only one can land.

Anything to do with an accounting connection, an invoice numbering series or a payment setup is never part of a standard. Those belong to each company by law.

Keeping them in step

Each standard shows every company beside it and whether it still matches: what is missing, what has been set up differently, and what that company has of its own. When you improve the original company's setup, use the refresh button on the standard to take a fresh copy, then push it again.

Everything the group has ever pushed is listed at the bottom of the page: which standard, into which company, by whom, and what it changed there.

Who can do this

Group owners and administrators. An administrator who covers only some of the companies can only push to those. Analysts cannot see the page at all.

One thing to know: people who are signed in when you push new permissions keep what they had until their next page load.