Companies Module
Setting Up Companies
Create the company workspace everything else in the app runs inside, switch between companies if you manage more than one, and build a subsidiary hierarchy if you need it.
Start here
1Create a company
There’s one form for this, and it’s the same one you’ll use to edit a company later — identity, address, currency, tax, and branding fields all live together, no separate wizard steps.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name | The only field that’s actually required. |
| Legal Name, Trading Name | Optional — for formal documents vs. everyday display. |
| Business Type | Individual/Personal, Sole Proprietorship, Partnership, LLC, Corporation, or Non-Profit. Drives what modules you start with — see below. |
| Industry | Technology, Retail, Healthcare, Religious, and 15+ others. Independent of Business Type — a hospital can be a corporation or a non-profit, and either way it’s still Healthcare. |
| Incorporation Date | Optional, reference only. |
| Email, Phone, Website | Contact details, validated if filled in. |
| Country, State, City, Postal Code, Address Line 1/2 | Country is required; State/Province is validated against that country’s real list once one exists. |
| Currency | Required. This is the currency every invoice, bill, and ledger entry in this company defaults to. |
| Timezone, Language | Required, picked from a fixed list. |
| Tax Number, VAT Number, Registration Number | Optional, printed on documents where relevant. |
| Fiscal Year Start | MM-DD format, e.g. 01-01. |
| Tax Regime | Standard, VAT Registered, GST Registered, or Withholding. |
| Invoice Prefix, Receipt Prefix | Defaults to INV / RCT. |
| Logo, Accent Color | Cosmetic — an invalid color is silently dropped rather than rejecting the save. |
| Parent Company | Optional — see Setting up a subsidiary. |
| Mark as Default | Only one company can hold this at a time; setting it here unsets it everywhere else. |
Save, and a few things happen automatically: a starter Chart of Accounts is seeded for the company’s Industry, Business Type, and currency; a default set of enabled modules is chosen based on that same Industry and Business Type (e.g. Individual/Personal skips Sales, Purchases, HR, Payroll, Products, and Inventory entirely — a personal money tracker doesn’t need invoicing or employees; Religious and Grantmaking industries skip Sales specifically, since neither has a customer-sales revenue model); and you’re granted access to the company you just created.
What gets turned on here is just a starting point for this company. Any of it can be switched on or off afterward without recreating the company.
Creating, editing, deleting, and switching companies all require an account with administrator-level access. If you can’t reach this screen, someone with that access needs to set up the company and then grant you access to work inside it.
Manage companies
2Switch your active company
If you have access to more than one company, only one is “active” for you at a time — every other module (Sales, Accounting, Reports, and the rest) reads and writes against whichever company that is. Use the company switcher to change it, or click Activate from the company list.
This is per-person: two administrators working in the same install can each have a different company open at once, and it’s remembered on your account until you switch again.
Active is what you personally have open right now. Default (the “Mark as Default” flag from creating a company) is the one the app falls back to — for a fresh session with nothing active yet, or when the company you had open gets deleted and you didn’t nominate a replacement.
Common tasks
Editing a company later
Same form as creating one — open the company and change whatever needs updating.
Every save re-applies the default-module logic for whatever Industry and Business Type are currently on the form — even if you only meant to update the phone number. Switching a company from Technology to Religious, for instance, will turn Sales off the next time you save, the same as if you’d set it that way from the start. If you’ve hand-picked a different module mix, double-check it after any save that touches these two fields.
Setting up a subsidiary
Set Parent Company on the subsidiary’s own record to build a hierarchy. This is visibility, not consolidation: whoever has access to the parent company can see its subsidiaries too (in the switcher and company list), at any depth — but opening a subsidiary as its own workspace still needs a direct grant on that subsidiary specifically, not just inherited visibility from the parent.
A company can’t be set as its own parent, and the app blocks any chain that would create a loop (A → B → A).
Deleting a company
Before you confirm, the app shows you a full breakdown of what’s about to go — invoices, bills, ledger entries, contacts, and every other record tied to that company’s company_id, across every module, plus attached files.
There’s no undo and no soft-delete/archive state — deleting removes every connected record before removing the company row itself.
If the company you’re deleting is the default or your currently active one, you can pick a replacement company to take over that role; if you don’t pick one, the app chooses another company automatically so you’re never left with zero default/active companies. Deleting your very last company is allowed too — there’s simply nothing left to fall back to.
Reference
Company status meanings
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Active | Active — counted in the “Active Companies” figure on the dashboard. |
| Draft | Draft — informational. |
| Inactive | Inactive — informational. |
As far as this module’s own logic goes, Status is a label you set by hand — Draft and Inactive don’t hide a company from the switcher or block access to it.
What this module doesn’t do
A company record carries an accounting mode (double-entry vs. simple) and a commerce type, both shown here for reference, but they’re configured in Settings, not on this form.
This module creates the initial access grant for whoever creates a company, but it doesn’t manage ongoing team access — adding or removing people from a company happens elsewhere, not on this form.