What an organisation is
An organisation is the tenant. It owns members, entitlement to modules, the billing relationship, and — inside every module — every record. A part in PLM, an invoice in Accounting, a channel in Chat: all of them carry an organisation id, and no query in the product returns a row from another one.
Modules mirror your organisation into their own storage the first time somebody from it arrives, keyed on the shell organisation id. That mirroring is why the module knows your company name without you typing it twice, and it is also why the organisation id is the thing that must never be guessed or defaulted — a write that lands in the wrong tenant is the worst class of bug in a system like this, so tenancy is a required column with no default everywhere it appears.
What to set
| Setting | Why it matters | Change later? |
|---|---|---|
| Legal name | Appears on invoices, envelopes and client-facing portals. | Yes |
| Timezone | Decides what "today" means for close periods, schedules and reports. | Yes |
| Base currency | The currency the ledger is kept in. Everything else is a translation of it. | Not really |
| Fiscal year end | Defines periods, the close calendar and every year-to-date figure. | Before you post |
| Branding | Logo and colour on client-facing surfaces — portal, invoices, signing. | Yes |
Both are settings, and both are technically editable. In practice, changing either after journal entries exist invalidates every comparative figure and every closed period. Decide them before the first posting. If you get it wrong and have already posted, treat it as a migration to a fresh organisation, not an edit.
Organisation
More than one organisation
One account can belong to many organisations — an agency running its own books and a client's, a group with several trading entities, a consultant with a dozen. The shell carries an organisation switcher, and switching changes what every module shows, because the module reads the current organisation from the same session you switched.
Two things to know about switching. First, entitlement is per organisation: the rail can gain and lose modules as you switch, and that is correct rather than a fault. Second, a session always has exactly one current organisation, seeded from your oldest active membership at sign-in. If you have several and land in the wrong one, switch before you start work rather than after.
Separate organisations are separate books with no cross-entity reporting between them. If what you want is one group view over several trading entities, that is multi-entity consolidation inside a single organisation, not two organisations. See Accounting.
What this does not do
Nothing in the product reads across two organisations. That is the point of the boundary.
There is no supported path to fold one organisation into another. Choose the structure before you load data.
Exports are per module today. A whole-tenant export is a support request.
Questions
Can two organisations share a contact list?
No. Contacts belong to an organisation. Duplicating them is the intended answer.
How do I leave an organisation?
An administrator removes your membership. Removing yourself is not offered — an organisation with no administrator is unrecoverable without support.
Does deleting an organisation delete the module data?
Organisation deletion is a support operation for exactly that reason.
Related
The three organisation roles in erp.io, exactly what each can do, and how modules narrow them further without adding new ones.
Invite your teamHow invitations work in erp.io, what a role grants, how seats are counted for billing, and why an invitation is the only supported way to add somebody.