Setting up your organisation

Your organisation is the company you work for, as Teralo holds it. It owns your people, your tool configuration, your plan and, if you host projects, the projects themselves. Almost everything else in Teralo hangs off it. See Organisations and projects.

This article covers creating one and the settings page you administer it from afterwards. The page is Settings, then Settings again in the group under your organisation's name, at the bottom of the sidebar.

You can only open your own organisation's settings. If you are looking at a project hosted by somebody else, their organisation's settings are not yours to see, and Teralo refuses the page rather than showing you an empty one.

Create an organisation

Anybody can create one. There is no invitation and no sales call in the way.

If you have just signed up, the last step of onboarding offers two routes: join an existing organisation, or create your own. If you already have an account, the same wizard is at Create Organisation from the organisation switcher at the top of the sidebar.

The wizard is six steps, and three of them are optional.

1. Name. The organisation's name, the country it operates in, your business number, and whether this is a Guest or a Host organisation. Guest is free and joins projects other people run; Host is paid and creates its own. See Plans and entitlements.
2. Currency. The base currency every money figure in Teralo is shown in. Read the section below before you click past it.
3. Details (optional). A description, your primary discipline and a mail prefix.
4. Billing, on a Host plan. A card, or an enterprise code.
5. Profile (optional). A logo and your main office address.
6. Tools (optional). Whether to start with Teralo's default tool configuration or with nothing.

Take the defaults on the last step unless you have a reason not to. It seeds mail types, document types and statuses, contract types and statuses, procurement categories and a working set of approval workflows, all of which you can edit afterwards. Starting blank means writing every one of them before anybody can raise anything.

Teralo offers to fill the form in for you

On the first step, Teralo looks at the company website behind your email address and offers what it finds there: the company name, a one-line description, a suggested discipline, and the office address. A card appears with Use these details and No thanks.

It is a suggestion and nothing more. Accepting it fills fields in that you can then edit, and it never overwrites something you have already typed. If your email is on a free webmail domain, or the site has nothing useful on it, no card appears and nothing is lost.

Your business number: ABN, company number or NZBN

The business number is the government identifier that tells your company apart from every other company with a similar name: an ABN in Australia, a company number in the United Kingdom, an NZBN in New Zealand. It is optional, and it is worth entering, because it is one of the three things people search on when they are looking for your organisation to join it.

Australian numbers can be verified against the Australian Business Register, and the result is shown in three tiers.

• Green. The register's entity name is a strong match for the name you entered, and its status is shown beside it. Any trading names come back too.
• Amber. A partial match. The entity exists, but its registered name is not what you typed. Check it is the right entity before continuing, because a partial match is exactly what you would see if you had picked up an associated company's number.
• Red. No match, or the number is not valid.

Verification for the United Kingdom and New Zealand is not live yet. Their labels and formats are already in Teralo, so the field is checked for shape, and the Verify button explains that the lookup is on its way. Entering the number by hand is fine either way; verification is optional everywhere.

Base currency is set once, and support has to change it

The base currency is chosen at step two of the wizard and cannot be edited afterwards. On the settings page it renders as a locked field with a padlock, and changing it means asking Teralo support.

That is deliberate rather than an omission. Every contract sum, budget line, procurement package, progress claim, variation and report in the organisation is stored and displayed against it, and an accounting integration syncs against it. Switching it later would reinterpret every figure already entered.

It is pre-selected from where you are, so most people never touch it. Check it anyway before clicking past that step.

For a Host organisation there is a second currency underneath it, the one Stripe invoices you in. Where Stripe cannot invoice in your base currency it falls back to one it can, and the wizard says so on the same step. See Billing.

Name, description and discipline

Three fields on the Organisation Information card, and each one is read by somebody outside your company.

Organisation Name, two to a hundred characters, is what appears beside your people everywhere in Teralo and on every document, claim and letter that carries your name.

Description, up to five hundred characters, is shown to the other organisations you work with on a project. Write what your company does, not a slogan.

Discipline is picked from a fixed industry list, grouped by trade, rather than typed. That is what makes it dependable to filter on: a project directory grouped by discipline is only useful if "Electrical Engineer" is spelled the same way by everyone. It also shows against your people in the project Directory.

Set a mail prefix

The Organisation Mail Prefix is a short code, up to eight characters, that goes on the front of every mail reference your organisation raises. With it set to ACME, an RFI numbers as ACME-RFI-001.

It is worth setting on day one and awkward to change later, because references already issued keep the prefix they were issued with. Use the abbreviation people already use in conversation. It is stored in capitals whatever you type.

See Mail for how the rest of the reference is built.

The main office address

The Main Office Address card holds one office: a name for it, the street address, city, state, postcode and country. Start typing into the search box at the top and pick the result rather than filling the fields in by hand, which gets the format right and saves five fields of typing.

The address appears against your organisation when somebody looks you up to invite you to a project, so an out-of-date one costs you invitations rather than post.

Logo and cover photo

Two images on the Organisation Visuals card, and they are used in different places.

Logo is square. Aim for 512 by 512 pixels. It is the mark beside your organisation's name in the project switcher, the directory and every list your company appears in, so it wants to be legible at about twenty pixels.

Cover photo is landscape, 16:9. It is the wider image on your organisation's own card.

Both open a crop dialog when you drop a file on them, and both take a JPEG, PNG or WebP. The small cross on the corner removes one.

Allow documents to be edited on desktop computers

One switch on the Desktop editing card, and it is off until somebody turns it on.

With it on, people in your organisation can open an organisation document in the application installed on their own computer, work in it, and have each save come back to Teralo as a new version. With it off, nothing can be checked out and a save from a copy taken earlier is refused.

Two things are worth knowing before you turn it on. Checking a document out copies it onto that computer's disk, which is the point and also the risk. And each person has to turn it on for their own computer as well, in the Teralo desktop app, so switching it on here permits the behaviour rather than starting it.

Switching it off later never deletes anything. Copies already on somebody's disk stay there, and they can still be saved by hand through the normal upload form. See The desktop app.

Insurances, licences and other compliance documents

The Compliance Documents card holds your organisation's own certificates with their expiry dates: public liability, workers compensation, contractor licences, ISO certifications.

Each entry has a name, a category, an optional expiry date and an optional file. Rows go amber as an expiry approaches and red once it has passed. The circular arrow on a row renews it: you upload the new certificate and the old one is archived rather than overwritten, so the history survives.

This is the same set a host asks you to satisfy when it sets requirements on a project. See Compliance documents.

Organisation administrators

The Organisation Administrators card lists the people who administer this organisation, and Add Administrator promotes somebody already in it.

An administrator bypasses permission checks for their own organisation and for the projects it hosts. That is the one place in Teralo where access does not come from a template, so keep the list short and keep it current. It stops at your organisation's edge: on somebody else's project your administrator is an ordinary guest on an ordinary template. See How permissions work.

Both promoting and removing an administrator emails the person concerned.

Delete your organisation

The last card on the page, and it does what it says. You type the organisation's name to confirm, and the warning above the button lists what goes with it: every project the organisation hosts, every document, file and piece of correspondence in them, every procurement record and register, every member assignment, every setting, and its offices.

There is no undo and no trash. If what you actually want is to stop paying, cancel the subscription instead, which leaves everything readable. See Billing.

Who can change these

Two permissions, and the split is the usual one.

Viewing settings opens the page. Managing settings enables the fields and the Save buttons. Somebody with only the first can read the organisation's details without being able to rewrite its name or its business number.

Organisation administrators hold both automatically. The one thing neither permission covers is administrators themselves: only an existing organisation administrator can promote or demote another one.

Managing settings is not the same as managing tools, people, permissions or billing. Those are four separate permissions on four separate pages, which is what lets you give the office manager the compliance documents without giving them the card details.