All guidesHow Horizon213 thinks
One installation, several companies
What a company owns, what a group can see, and why the group view never lets you write anything.
- Steps
- 4 · About 3 min
- Who can do this
- Owner · Manager · Accountant · Team member · Read only
One Horizon213 installation can run several companies. They may be genuinely separate businesses that happen to share an owner, or branches of one group that deliberately share customers and a catalogue.
Which of those you have changes almost nothing about daily work, and everything about what you can see at once.
The company owns everything
Every invoice, payment, stock movement and journal entry belongs to exactly one company. Not to the group, not to the installation — to a company, always unambiguously.
That is why the company you are working in is shown permanently in the sidebar, and why every guide about creating something tells you to check it first. It is the one piece of context that cannot be inferred from what you are doing.
Switching company keeps you on the same screen: move from Sales in one company to Sales in another and you stay where you were, looking at different books.
What companies do and do not share
Separate by default. Customers, products, stock, cash, accounts and documents belong to their company and are invisible from the others. A team member given one company cannot tell the others exist.
Shared on purpose, one record at a time. A contact or a product can be marked shared with the group, which makes it usable across companies without duplicating it. Only an organisation owner or administrator can do that, and it applies to master data — never to transactions.
Configured independently. Modules, fiscal regime, currency, document footers and business-specific fields are per company. Two companies in one workspace can look like different products.
Group view is for looking, not touching
Switch to Group overview and you get consolidated registers and a consolidated dashboard, with every row naming the company it came from.
It is read-only for everyone, including the owner. The reason is the rule at the top of this page: a transaction must have one unambiguous owner, and a screen showing several companies at once cannot say which one a new invoice would belong to. Rather than guess, Horizon213 does not offer the button.
Deep pages are not available in group mode either — you can see the sales register for the group, but not one invoice's own page. Choose the company and you are there.
Money is not added up across currencies
Where companies use different accounting currencies, group totals show the amounts separately rather than summing them. A single number would be arithmetic performed on incompatible things, and would look authoritative while being meaningless.
This is also why a group figure sometimes shows a count where you expected a total: a safe count is more use than a false sum.
Unrelated customers should not share an installation. Two businesses with no connection get their own deployment and their own database — the group is for a group, not for saving on hosting.