Overview of Multi-Org
Overview
Zuora defines Multi-org as: “ A business that may have subsidiaries, divisions, business units, or brands, where the business acquired these “entities” by either merging with another company, acquiring a company, or establishing international offices with independent structures. “
As your business evolves over time, you would expand to new geographies, establish joint ventures, merge with another company, or acquire smaller companies. With Zuora Multi-org., each of these subsidiaries, divisions, business units, or brands would function as independent business/org units and cater to its unique business and financial requirements, including compliance with local laws, taxation, and legal guidelines, transacting in local currencies.
While each of these independent org units continues to have independent processes, Zuora multi-org. lets you build your organizational hierarchy based on your business structure and combines your company’s billing and revenue financials under a single tenant to give you a unified view of your overall business performance.
How does Zuora Multi-org work?
To understand how Zuora Multi-org works, let’s consider the following example:
Acme Corp is a global company headquartered in Germany. They operate in two different regions viz. Western Europe and Central Europe, and further distributed into Spain, France, Germany, and Austria, each being an independent org unit.
In this example, Acme Corp, the parent company, is the root of this organizational hierarchy and an org unit by itself. Each business unit defined under the parent is known as an org unit. This organizational hierarchy follows a parent-child relationship, wherein all the org units defined under the parent or root organization are children of the company. Businesses can transact at all levels of this organizational hierarchy. i.e., at the root level or at a branch or leaf level like Central Europe or Germany in the example above.
The above example illustrates one of the many ways in which you can structure your company’s organizational hierarchy.
Basic concepts and terms
Before you start with Zuora Multi-org, understanding some basic concepts and essential terms is recommended to help you make better choices or decisions while working with it.
Company
This is the root of your organizational hierarchy and an org unit. This is the only location where your org admin can define the Reporting Currency.
Tenant
A tenant can be any Zuora tenant in any environment or type. Your organization can have different tenants, like development, testing, and production. Zuora Multi-org shall be available in your Central SBX and Production environments.
Organizational Hierarchy (Org hierarchy)
The org hierarchy represents the grouping of an organization based on geo-location, products or target markets. These groups together make up your business.
Org. Unit
An org unit is a child of the parent company (root). An org unit can be a branch with additional child org units defined under it or a leaf with no children under it. For example, Western Europe and Central Europe are branch-level org units and Austria, Germany, France, and Spain are leaf-level org units.
Org. Switcher
The org. switcher lists all the org. units created in the multi-org. hierarchy. After you log in from the Zuora UI, you can switch to the org. unit that you have permission to access from the org. switcher.
The org. switcher is in the upper right of the page and next to your login user name. When you click the current org. display name, the multi-org. hierarchy is displayed. You can click the checkbox against the org. unit display name from the org. switcher to access the org. data. You can select one or more org. units to view data, based on your permission to access. Also, you can search for an org. unit by its display name in the search organizations field. The org. units that you do not have permission to access will not be listed here.
User Access in Multi-Org. across multiple org. units
Each org. unit is completely isolated from other org. units. A user by default can only access the org. units to which the user is added. To access the other org. units, the user must be granted permission to access them. Only the org. super administrators have permission to grant or deny user access. See Add users to multiple org. units for more information.
Reporting Currency
The currency used to create financial reports including corporate roll-up reporting for multi-org business. The Reporting Currency is defined at the root level and inherited by the child org units. The child org units cannot change or override their reporting currency. Your business can have only one reporting currency.
Functional Currency
The currency used by each org unit for their financial reporting. Each org unit in the org hierarchy can define a different functional currency. Once set, the functional currency cannot be changed. The exchange rate settings will be configured at the root level while creating your organization’s tenant and inherited by the child org units.
Transaction Currency
The currency used in the product catalog and by the customer account. It is inherited from the product rate plan charge and remains the same for different Zuora processes including Invoice, Payment, Credit, and Debit memos. As an exception, Transaction APIs will allow the creation of transactions in a currency different from the billing account or product rate plan charge. In such cases, the transaction currency will be the currency in which the transactions are created via the API.