Orgs

Organisations are the main structure in coco for a business, a charity, a community, a startup or a group.

There are lots of different types of ways to work with coco if you are a large or small business or a network of smaller departments or franchisees in a larger group –

• organisations (or organizations),
• businesses,
• communities
• charities
• enterprises
• small business
• groups
• organising volunteers
• informal startups
• formally registered companies
• departments within a larger organisation
• franchises
• villages
• markets

For simplicity there are two types of structures in coco, individual people and groups/businesses.

Groups are collections of individuals that work together in an informal or formal organisation. We call them orgs for short.

So to manage a village or a farmers market there might be a bunch of small businesses, mainly informal ones, that work along side and share a few things like lighting, water, parking and maybe even branding. But they are all separate businesses with their own product and services inventory and their own choices on pricing and customers.

It is the same for a large hospital, each department has their own accounting, inventory, teams, waiting rooms or queues etc. They probably don’t have separate brands but they do have separate department names and some departments may be slightly duplicated due to commercial or technical reasons like x-rays and CT scans or different types of pathology in-house vs outsourced vs preferred 3rd party partners.

With coco orgs hey can both choose how they structure or compose their approach –

• one org – everything goes in one big bucket, transparency is high and here is one way of doing most things, you can search across everything easily but privacy and separation is a lower, sharing is maximised
• separate orgs – standalone organisations, from our examples above each hospital department or village store has their own org, no sharing, everyone does their own thing, zero transparency and indivudal people can work for more than one but it requires setting up roles each time, reporting and searching across orgs is difficult although you can compare some things with a little extra work
• linked orgs – blends the benefits of one org and separate orgs, you share reporting and access control with ability to log in to multiple orgs at one time and search across them one at a time

Generally as a guide choose separate orgs for each department in a larger company or each store in a village. You can link them later.