Organisation level and project level

Your organisation has a document library. So does each project. Your organisation has a directory, and so does each project. The first time you meet that it reads like duplication, and it is not: the organisation holds the standard, the project holds the working copy. One idea explains most of Teralo's navigation, and it is worth learning once rather than being surprised by it seven times.

The two levels

Organisation level is your company. It is where things are true across every job you run: the inspection checklist your business uses, the permit types you issue, the plant you own, the roles you hire into, the templates your projects start from. Nothing here belongs to one job.

Project level is one job. It is where those standards are put to work: this project's inspections against that checklist, this project's permits of those types, the plant allocated here, the people on this site.

You can tell which level you are on from the switcher at the top of the sidebar and from the breadcrumb across the top of the screen. A project's breadcrumb names the organisation and then the project; the organisation's names only the organisation. The sidebar itself is different at each level, because most tools only exist at one of them.

What lives where

Most things belong to one level and stay there.

Only at organisation level: your company details and branding, members and their applications to join, permission templates, billing and your plan, the tools catalogue, estimating, tenders and cashflow. These are all statements about the business rather than about a job.

Only at project level: everything that only makes sense against one site. Inspections, incidents, observations, submittals, the programme, bookings, timesheets, mail, the site diary, meetings, photos, procurement, contracts, claims and variations.

The seven that exist at both

Seven tools carry the same name at both levels, and this is where the pattern earns its keep: Directory, Documents, Equipment, Inductions, Method statements, Permits and Whiteboard.

In each case the organisation register is the pool and the project register is what is in play on that job. Your organisation's Directory lists everybody who works for you; a project's directory lists everybody on that project, from every organisation. Your organisation's Documents library holds the standards, specifications and company templates you reuse; a project's documents are that job's drawings and revisions. Your organisation's Equipment register is the plant you own with its servicing and certificates; a project's is what is allocated to that site.

The same split runs through Inductions, Method statements and Permits: the organisation holds the workers, documents and types that travel with your business, and the project holds this job's inductions, this job's statements and this job's permits. A worker inducted on one project does not have to have their tickets loaded again for the next one, which is the whole point of holding them at organisation level.

Whiteboard is the odd one out and the simplest: an organisation whiteboard is for your own team, a project whiteboard is shared with the project.

Every article about one of these seven opens with a strip saying which levels it covers, so you can tell at a glance whether what you are reading applies to the screen you are looking at.

Configuration flows downwards, records do not flow up

The direction of travel matters and it only goes one way.

A tool is configured at organisation level, with its types, statuses, templates and workflows, and then activated on the projects that need it. The project inherits what you set up and can hold its own additions on top. That is why setting the organisation up properly before creating your first project saves work: every project created afterwards starts from it. See The tools catalogue.

Workflow templates work the same way. An organisation template carries the structure of an approval; activating it on a project and taking a copy is what attaches this project's actual reviewers to it. See Templates and runs.

Records do not travel back up. An inspection carried out on a project stays on that project. What crosses back to organisation level is reporting: cashflow and the report builder read across every project you host, which is how you get a view of the business rather than of one job.

Permissions are separate at each level

You are given a permission template at organisation level and a permission template on each project, and they are different templates from different catalogues. There are far more project permissions than organisation ones, because most of Teralo is project work.

So a colleague can be an organisation administrator and still be on one of your projects as View Only, or be an ordinary member of the organisation and run a project. The two do not imply each other, with one exception: an organisation administrator has full access to the projects their own organisation hosts. See How permissions work.