Setup

Business units

Register your organization's units, such as branches, divisions or markets, each with a default currency and language, and arrange them in a hierarchy with a parent unit. It is how your company structure is represented inside the CRM.

Companies with more than one front rarely operate in a single currency and a single language. A holding company with an arm in Chile bills in pesos; the export division works in English. Business units hold that reality in the CRM: each unit is a row with a name, a default currency, a default language and a place in the organization's tree.

How to register one

Open Settings and go to the People and access group.
Click Business units.
In the New unit card, fill in the unit name.
Pick the Default currency and the Default language from the lists.
Under Parent unit (hierarchy), choose the unit above this one, or leave it at None (root) if it sits at the top.
Leave Active ticked and click Save.

When multiple companies is on, the form also shows Company. That link is what makes a governance policy scoped to this unit reach records: a record carries the company that stamped it, never a unit. Leave it empty and the unit keeps working for currency, language and hierarchy, but its governance policy reaches no record.

The list below shows the units already registered, indented according to the hierarchy, with an arrow marking the subunits. Each row carries a short summary of the currency and language plus the Edit and Delete buttons. Deactivated units appear with their name struck through, which lets you take a branch out of circulation without erasing its history.

Example: Andrade Group registers the unit Andrade Group as the root, in BRL and Portuguese. It then creates Andrade Brazil with Andrade Group as the parent unit, also in BRL, and Andrade Chile with the same parent unit, currency CLP and Spanish as the language. The list now shows the two branches indented under the holding company.

A hierarchy with no traps

The system refuses any arrangement that would create a cycle, meaning a unit ending up below itself or below one of its own subunits. In that case the screen shows a warning explaining that the operation would create a cycle in the hierarchy, and nothing is saved. The parent unit picker also leaves out the very unit you are editing.

Deleting a unit

Deleting asks for confirmation and removes only that row. The subunits are not deleted: they simply lose a valid parent and go back to being shown at the top level, ready for you to slot them in wherever it makes sense. If all you want is to stop using the unit, untick Active instead of deleting it.

Who can do this

Saving and deleting units requires permission to administer settings. Viewing the list is open to anyone who can reach the organization's Settings.

Common questions

I saved a new unit and it updated an existing one: names are unique within the organization. Saving with a name that already exists updates the unit with that name instead of creating a duplicate.
The language list is shorter than the system's: a unit's default language offers English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. Each person's interface language is still chosen in their own profile, among the system's ten languages.
Does the unit's currency change the value of my deals? No. It is the unit's default; each opportunity's amount still carries its own currency, and totals convert at the prevailing rate.
Do I need to register units in order to use the CRM? No. It is a feature for companies with more than one front; an empty screen gets in nobody's way.

Open this article inside the system →