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Managing Multiple Companies in Sonar: Best Practices

Mitchell Ivany Updated by Mitchell Ivany

Read Time: 5 mins

In Sonar, we give you the option of adding multiple companies into Sonar. These companies allow you to organize customers, contracts, and services in Sonar, all while allowing you to slowly onboard new company acquisitions and their customers.

Why Use Multiple Companies?

If you acquire another business or merge with a company and need to bring their customers into Sonar over time, using multiple companies can make the transition much easier. It lets you keep customers organized while you integrate—so you can track things like services, payments, and activity separately as needed.

Below are a few common scenarios and how using multiple companies in Sonar can help simplify your process.

Scenario 1 – Create a Flanker Brand (a separate “lower-cost” company)

A flanker brand is a second brand you run alongside your main one—typically cheaper/simpler—while still using the same underlying systems and infrastructure. In Sonar, you can do this by creating a separate company inside your instance, with its own customers and offerings, while keeping everything unified for reporting/accounting.

How this would get done
  1. Create your new company by going to Settings > Company > Companies > Create Company.
  2. Fill in the company details like you would in the Basic Company Setup.
    1. Make sure “Default” is unchecked.
  3. Set up what this company will sell by creating the three core components for the new company: Services, Packages, and Usage-Based Billing Policies.
    1. You’ll also need Address Lists to control speed profiles. An Address List can be reused across multiple services/companies (since it’s tied to the service configuration, not restricted by company).
A Service can only belong to one company, but an Address list can be re-used for speed profiles across services and companies.
  1. Start adding customers under the new company by signing them up using the newly created company in Sonar, then assign them the new services and packages you created.

Scenario 2 - Company Acquisition

In this scenario, we'll explain how to bring the acquired company’s customers, services, and pricing into your Sonar instance while keeping the transition as smooth and low-touch as possible.

How this would get done
  1. After the acquisition is finalized, create a new company under Settings → Company → Companies → Create Company.
  2. Enter the company information as you would in the Basic Company Setup, but make sure “Default” is unchecked.
    If it helps with continuity, you can also keep the acquired company’s name, logo, and customer portal URL (if they had one).
  3. Create the Services for the acquired company using one of these approaches:
    1. If their prices are lower than yours, use expiring services that start at the lower rate and expire after a set time.
    2. If their prices are the same or higher, place customers on the same (or closest) service level at their current price and send a mass email to notify them of the change.
  4. When creating customers, add them under the acquired company’s name until you’re ready to migrate them or merge them into your primary company.
These are examples, not a complete instruction set. If you have questions, contact support at support@sonar.software.

Considerations When Using Multiple Companies

Using multiple companies in a single Sonar instance can make things easier, but there are a few important details to keep in mind. In particular, it’s helpful to understand how multiple companies interact with these Sonar features:

Sonar FCC Form 477 Reporting

Sonar lets you choose how accounts appear on your FCC Form 477 report: either all accounts under your default company or under the company each account belongs to.

Configure the setting:

  1. Go to Settings → System Settings
  2. Scroll to the Form 477 section
  3. In FCC Form 477 Company Source, select:
    1. System-wide default company, or
    2. Company of the account
  4. Save your changes.
When to Use Each Option
  1. System-wide default company: Best if your extra companies are mainly flanker brands and you want one combined submission under your main company.
  2. Company of the account: Best if your companies are operationally separate and you need reporting broken out so you can submit per company.

User Access

Users can’t be limited to specific companies, so anyone with the right permissions can access and make changes across all accounts, no matter the company.

Ticket Management

Tickets also can’t be restricted by the company. Users with ticket permissions can view and reply to all incoming customer emails, regardless of which company or inbound email address the customer used.

Billing Considerations

Sonar’s automated billing defaults can’t be set per company. If different companies require different billing settings, create separate account types and assign the right billing defaults to each one. Then, select the correct account type when creating new accounts so the correct billing parameters are applied.

If you add a new account type and link it to a billing default, existing accounts won’t update automatically. Be sure to review billing settings on any existing accounts affected by the change.
Payment Processors

For both Bank Account and Credit Card processors, there can still only be one primary processor of each type at a time within a single instance. The primary processor acts as the default for the entire instance.

However, Sonar also supports associating processors with specific Company records. This allows you to maintain separate merchant accounts per Company if desired. When a card or bank account is tokenized, Sonar will first check whether there is a processor explicitly associated with the Company tied to that Account. If a Company-specific processor exists, Sonar will use it. If not, Sonar will fall back to the primary processor.

If additional processors are added, the Sonar Support Team can still import existing tokens to allow continued processing with that processor until tokens expire or a customer re-adds their payment method. Additionally, payment methods remain tokenized against the processor/merchant that was used at the time they were created—there is currently no automation to re-tokenize payment methods if Company associations change or a Company is removed.

As you add payment processors to your instance, you're able to select whether they'll be the primary processor or not. For details on how to do this, click here.

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