Branches

In standard form, Charitylog customers can share details of all of the organisations/people they deal with across all of their staff. Work done with those people can be restricted from users on a per-user basis, but every user of the system can always see all the organisations and people on that system. However, some customers actually don't want things to be this open - they want to have some way of restricting the visibility of the organisations/people themselves so that only certain members of staff can see that they even exist. This happens most commonly in partnership organisations or consortia, where the system is actually used by several separate customer organisations. The partnership/consortium want the benefits of a standardised system, and the ability to report on everything at once, but with control of what users can see.

Charitylog's Branches module allows this. You can set up as many Branches as you require, and then put organisations/people in one or more branches. Each user is also allowed access to one or more branches. The user will be able to see only the organisations/people in the branch that they are currently logged into. Administrators control both the visibility of organisations/people, and the access permissions of users, thereby making sure that users only see what they should see.

There is great flexibility available with the Branches module, and this means that the setup of a branch system is quite involved. We advise that you have a day with one of our Implementation Consultants on site to help you set up a branch system. However, this chapter should give you a good idea of what the Branches module can do for you. It is perfectly possible to convert an existing system to a Branch system, if you require. Call us for details.

How does it work?

The Branch system uses the ideas of Branch access and Branch visibility.

• Users have Branch Access, that is, they are allowed to access and work in one or more branches. They cannot be in more than one branch at the same time; they must choose which to work in. (Users with access to more than one branch can switch branches at any time, and switching branches doesn't require the user to log out and log in again)
• Things in the system have Branch visibility, that is, they can be seen by users who are logged in to a particular branch. Things in the system can have visibility in more than one branch.

What are these things in the system?

Three main things:

• Organisations and People have branch visibility. For example, clients may well only be visible in a single branch. Organisations that work with every branch of your organisation/business (the council, for example) may be visible in all branches.
• Projects have branch visibility.
  • Therefore, a user will only be able to create referrals in Projects that are visible to the Branch they are in at the time.
• Referrals have branch visibility. Referrals can only be visible to one Branch. Referrals are always created with visibility to the branch that the user creating them is in at the time.
  • Therefore, most of the time, a user will only be able to see referrals that were created in the Branch that they are currently in.

Setting up Branches

In a new Branch system, at least one main branch will be created. If you have had your system converted to a Branch system, everything you were using before will probably have been migrated to one main Branch.

To create more Branches, click on Administration > Security > Branch Management > Branches/Offices.

You will now see the list of existing Branches.

To create a new Branch, click the "Create New" button in the top right hand corner of the screen.

Enter the name of the new Branch (plus any other information you want to add)

Click the "Save and Close" button when done.

The new Branch is now created and ready for use.

What the user sees

In a Branch system, the User Account Details page has an extra tab called "Branch Details".

From this tab you can set the view permissions for the user. Options for which branches they are allowed to access are:

• All branches
• Individual Branches (tick/select every branch you want this user to be able to see)
• Groups of Branches (Views)

What this setting actually governs

This setting governs which branches a user is allowed to access, or work in. They can choose to work in that branch by selecting it from a drop-down menu at the top of the screen.

When a user is working in a branch:

• searches for organisations and people will only show results from the branch they are working in
• referrals they create will be created within their logged-in branch