Running several companies

Some businesses are not one company. A group with two trading entities, a franchise with branches, a builder who runs a separate company for developments — each needs its own jobs, its own numbers and its own reporting, but not its own copy of everything.

A company pool joins them. One company is the master, the others are members. People work across them with one login, and the lists worth keeping in one place — suppliers, price lists, templates — come from the master.

Set up with SmarteBuild

Pools are part of the Enterprise plan and are set up with you rather than switched on from a settings page. Talk to SmarteBuild about how your group is organised and which company should be the master.

What the master company is for

The master is the company whose lists the others can borrow. It is usually head office, or the original company the business started as.

It is not a parent that owns the others’ data. Jobs, estimates, orders and invoices stay with the company they belong to, and nothing is pooled unless you ask for it.

What each company can share

Each member company has its own settings, under Manage Companies in the Admin panel:

Setting	What it does
Has access to the suppliers of the master company	The master’s suppliers are available in this company
Has access to the pricelists of the master company	The master’s price lists are available in this company
Has separate suppliers from the master company	This company keeps its own supplier list
Has separate item’s pricing from the master company	This company sets its own prices, rather than using the master’s

The last two are the ones that decide whose list you are actually editing. With separate pricing off, a rate changed here is the group’s rate and everybody gets it. With it on, this company’s prices are its own and the master’s are left alone.

Which to choose

One list for the group — separate turned off — suits a franchise or a group buying on one set of supply agreements. Negotiate once, and every branch prices off the same rates.

Separate lists suit companies that genuinely buy differently: different state, different suppliers, different freight. Sharing rates across them produces estimates that look consistent and are wrong.

You can mix the two. A common arrangement is shared suppliers so everybody orders from the same approved list, with separate pricing so each branch keeps its own negotiated rates.

What people see

Access is per person, per company. For each user you pick the company, then set what they get in it — the modules, and which jobs.

That means one person can be an estimator in one company and a site supervisor in another, with margins visible in one and hidden in the other. Somebody who should only ever see one branch is only given that one.

Sign in once, and you are in your own company. Open a job belonging to another company in the pool and you move into that company with it — its projects, its dashboard, its numbers. Nothing from the company you left is mixed in.

The company you are in is the company you are working on

Raising an order or a claim always uses the company whose job you have open, not the one you signed in to. When people work across several branches in a day, the habit worth teaching is to check the job first — the rest follows from it.

What the estimate can reach

When you price a job, the items you can pull in come from three places:

1. The SmarteBuild price list, available to everyone.
2. This company’s own price list.
3. The master company’s price list, when this company is set to use it.

Call-up sheet templates work the same way, so a group can write its standard call-ups once in the master and every branch has them.

Setting it up

1. Decide which company is the master — the one whose lists the group should share.
2. SmarteBuild creates the pool and adds the member companies.
3. For each member, choose the four sharing settings above.
4. Give each person access to the companies they need, and set their modules and jobs in each one.
5. Check it with one real job before the group moves across: open a job in a member company, price an item, and confirm the rate that came through is the one you expected.

Step five is worth the ten minutes. Shared-versus-separate pricing is the setting people get the wrong way round, and it is much easier to see on one item than to unpick across a finished estimate.