One Organization With Sites, or Separate Organizations?

If your business runs in more than one place — several branch offices, a few regional teams, or a group of related companies — there are two clean ways to set it up in Ambivo, and they are not interchangeable. Picking the right one up front saves a painful migration later. This guide walks through both, told as real-world stories, so you can match your situation to the right shape.

The One Idea That Decides Everything

Before the stories, hold on to a single distinction:

• An Organization is your Ambivo account. It is a hard boundary. Everything company-wide lives at this level: one currency, one brand, one set of email/sending domains, one billing plan, one set of integrations, and one user directory.
• A Site is an office, branch, or business unit inside one organization. It is a soft boundary. A site decides who sees whose records, but still shares the organization's currency, brand, billing, and settings.

A site shares the organization's money and settings. A separate organization does not. Almost every one-account-or-several question answers itself once you know whether the locations need to share money and settings or keep them apart.

Story 1 — One Organization With Sites

Meet Brightline Realty. Maya owns a residential brokerage with three offices in the same state: Austin, Dallas, and Houston. All three bill clients in the same currency, send email from @brightlinerealty.com, run the same commission plans, and roll up to Maya for a single monthly P&L. Each office manager only wants to see their own office's leads and deals, but Maya wants to see all three at once.

This is a textbook case for one organization with three sites.

Maya Sets It Up Like This

• In Company Settings → Sites, she adds three sites: Austin (code AUS), Dallas (DAL), and Houston (HOU)
• She creates roles for each office — "Austin Manager", "Austin Agent", and so on — and picks the matching site code on each role
• She assigns each person to the role for their office
• She leaves her own account on no site-bound role, which makes her cross-cutting — she sees every office

What Brightline Gets

• One login per person and one shared directory
• Built-in roll-up reporting — one pipeline view, one dashboard, all three offices together
• Set it up once — products, templates, playbooks, and integrations configured a single time
• A shared world — a lead can be routed between offices, and the office tag follows the record through its whole life
• One bill — a single subscription for the whole company

What Brightline Gives Up (and Is Fine With)

• One currency and one brand for all three offices
• Soft separation, not a wall — sites control visibility; this is offices of one company, not sealed vaults

Brightline is one business with three front doors. One organization, three sites, done.

Story 2 — Separate Organizations

Meet the Vantage Group. Priya chairs a holding group with three businesses: a software firm in India, a logistics company in Nigeria, and a consulting practice in the United States. Each bills in its own currency, sends email from its own domain, has its own brand, files taxes as its own legal entity, and pays for its own software.

Trying to force these into one organization breaks immediately: an organization can only hold one currency and one brand/domain. This is a textbook case for three separate organizations — one Ambivo account per business.

The Group Sets It Up Like This

• Each business gets its own Ambivo organization, with its own currency, brand, sending domain, payment connection, and subscription
• Each business's local leader is the administrator of their own organization
• Priya and her operations partner are given an account in each of the three organizations

What the Vantage Group Gets

• True separation — each business's data, billing, and settings are fully isolated
• Independent currency, brand, and domain per business
• Independent billing and plans per business
• Sovereign administrators — each local leader runs their own house

What the Vantage Group Gives Up (and Plans Around)

• No automatic cross-business roll-up — no single dashboard out of the box
• A login per business for group leaders
• Shared setup is repeated in each organization

Vantage is three businesses with a common owner. Three organizations, overseen by two people who carry an account in each.

How to Decide

Ask one question about your locations: Are these one business with several offices, or several businesses that happen to share an owner?

If any of these is true, you almost certainly need separate organizations:

• The locations bill customers in different currencies
• They send email from different domains or need different branding
• They are separate legal entities that file and bill independently

If none of those is true and you mainly want offices to have their own view of leads and deals, one organization with sites is simpler, cheaper, and gives you roll-up reporting for free.

But I Want Both Separation and a Combined View

• One organization with sites gives you the combined view automatically, but everything shares one currency and one set of settings
• Separate organizations give you hard separation, but a combined view is not automatic — it takes a consolidated report built across the accounts
• You can't get hard, currency-level separation and a free built-in roll-up from a single setup

What the Consolidated (Group) Report Shows

When you connect separate organizations into a tenant group, the group's HQ gets a reporting dashboard that:

• Rolls every member up into one view — pipeline, deals, and revenue across all member organizations, converted into a single reporting currency
• Compares members side by side — the same numbers broken down per organization
• Drills down to the underlying records — from a chart you can open the actual records behind a number

Drill-down covers every standard record type — leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, orders, invoices, and tasks. Each member controls which it shares and whether personal details are masked. You view one record type at a time — different record types have different columns, so they can't share one table.

Reporting and drill-down happen in the reports dashboard, not in the admin Tenant Groups screen. Tenant Groups is where you create the group and manage consent; the dashboard is where HQ views and compares the numbers.

Setting Up Sites (the Brightline Path, Briefly)

If one organization with sites is your fit, here's the short version (full detail is in CRM-006):

1. 1

   Add sites

   Company Settings → Sites → Add site. Give each office a Name, a short Site code (e.g. AUS), and its address.

2. 2

   Create roles

   Create a role per office and pick that office's site code on the role.

3. 3

   Assign people

   Assign each person to the role for their office. Leave owners and group managers off office roles so they stay cross-cutting.

Think of it as a simple grid: your offices across the top, your roles down the side, and a person placed in each cell. Filling a cell assigns that person to that office's role — the system carries the office tag through every record they touch.

Related Guides

• CRM-006 — Auto-Assign Leads and Tasks to Your Team
• CRM-024 — Account Management and Profile
• CRM-022 — Welcome and Platform Overview