Basic concepts and terms of Multi-Org
Use this topic as a glossary for Multi-Org concepts and UI elements such as the Org Context Switcher, Org Picker, and currency types.
Before you start with Zuora Multi-Org, understanding some basic concepts and essential terms is recommended to help you make better choices or decisions while interacting with it.
Core entities
Company: The root of your organizational hierarchy and the root org unit. The company is the only level at which your org administrator can define the currency.
Tenant: Any Zuora tenant in any environment or type. Your organization can use multiple tenants, such as development, testing, and production. Zuora Multi-Org is available in the Central Sandbox and Production environments.
Organizational hierarchy (org hierarchy): The structure that represents how an organization is grouped by factors such as geographic location, product, or target market. Together, these groups form your overall business structure.
Org unit: A node within the organizational hierarchy. An org unit is either a branch that contains child org units or a leaf that has no children. For example, Western Europe and Central Europe are branch org units, and Austria, Germany, France, and Spain are leaf org units.
UI controls & access
Multi-Org provides two UI controls to help you scope data and assign objects to org units: the org context switcher and the org picker.
Org context switcher
The org context switcher is a UI component that you use to select one or more org units from the Multi-Org hierarchy and set your current working context. After you log in to the Zuora UI, you can switch context between the org units that you have permission to access.
The org context switcher is located in the upper-right corner of the page, next to your user name. To open the Multi-Org hierarchy, select the current org display name. From the hierarchy, you can select one or more org units to set your data-access scope, based on your assigned permissions. You can also search for an org unit by display name in the search field. Org units that you do not have permission to access are displayed in the hierarchy but cannot be selected. For example, if you have access only to the leaf org Acme UK, the branch org units are visible but not selectable. Each user is assigned a default org unit during user creation. You can update your default org unit at your first login to match your personalization preferences.
Use the org context switcher to define your working context by selecting one or more org units. Your working context filters the data and objects that fall within the selected org scope, and affects the following scenarios:
- List page: On list pages for objects such as customer accounts or products, only the objects that are accessible within the current org context are displayed. For example, if you select Acme France and Acme Spain in the org context switcher, the Customer Accounts list page displays only the accounts associated with those two org units.
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Object creation or edit: When you create or edit objects such as customer accounts or products, you must explicitly assign the org units that the object should be associated with. This is done through the org picker.
Org picker
The org picker displays a sub-tree of the org hierarchy, limited to the org units that are available in your current org context. For example, when you create a product in the Product Catalog, the org picker allows selection only from the org units that you selected in the org context switcher. When you select specific org units in the org picker, the product becomes available to those org units.
Currency
Multi-Org supports three currency types that control financial reporting and transactions across the org hierarchy:
Reporting currency: The currency that is used to generate financial reports, including corporate roll-up reporting for Multi-Org businesses. It is defined at the root org unit and automatically is inherited by all child org units. Child org units cannot modify or override this setting. Each business can have only one Reporting Currency.
Functional currency: The currency that each org unit uses for its own financial reporting. Every org unit in the hierarchy can define its own functional currency. After the functional currency is configured, it cannot be changed. Exchange rate settings are defined at the root level when the tenant is created and are inherited by all child org units.
Transaction currency: The currency that is used in the product catalog and customer accounts. The transaction currency is inherited from the product rate plan charge and remains consistent across Zuora processes such as invoices, payments, credits, and debit memos. As an exception, transaction APIs support creating transactions in a currency that differs from the billing account or product rate plan charge. In these cases, the transaction currency is the currency that is specified in the API request.