Your client has a primary headquarters and several subsidiary office locations. In Manage, you can enter office locations as Sites under the parent Company or as individual Companies themselves. How do you decide which way to go – Company vs. Site?  

Sites under a parent Company, can be assigned a different agreement than the parent Company, they can use a different tax code than the parent Company, and even be associated with a different Calendar than the parent Company.   All this provides a ton of flexibility to provide different service coverage, billing schedules, tax rates, SLAs and for Sites which differ for those used by the parent Company. 

!  What you cannot do for a Site is assign it a Primary Contact or Billing Address/Contact that differs from that of the Parent Company.  

What does this mean? Why is this important? 

1. Primary Contact: Every ticket created in Manage must have a contact. Companies must have a designated Primary Contact to be the default ticket contact if a ticket is created without a contact – say from an RMM integration or a recurring ticket template.   Workflows and status notifications sending notifications to an item’s contact will go to the wrong individuals if the Parent Company Primary Contact is used.   Your Dispatcher or Technicians may also reach out to the wrong person which is annoying for them and the customer.   So, if a Site default contact differs from the Parent Company default contact, you may consider creating second Company in ConnectWise Manage.
2. Billing Address/Contact: Sites use the Parent Company’s Primary Billing Address and Contact and when billing items outside of an agreement.  If a Parent Company has 3 locations and each location is responsible for tracking and paying service overages billed outside of an agreement, creating separate Companies for each of the locations would be the preferred setup.   While there are “tricks” to separate out billing per office location, the easiest way to maintain billing automation, separate the overages per site, and direct the invoice to the correct Billing Contact is to create each site as a unique Company.   Note:  When creating separate companies, you may run into issues with tickets created by email if a contact is listed in more than one of the companies.

Always consider these two items when deciding Company vs. Site. Setting this up correctly is critical to utilize the automation features inherent to Manage and make it easier for your staff to service your clients.