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A branch is a place your company does business from — a store,
warehouse, plant or office. OpenJanela uses it to answer one question everywhere:
whose is this? Whose order, whose purchase order, whose ticket, whose numbers on the
report. Every company has at least one branch and exactly one of them is the
Home Office (the main branch) — including companies that do not think of themselves as
having branches at all.
What, where, who, when, why
| What | The concept chapter for branches: what a branch is in OpenJanela, the Home Office rule, and how the branch answers “whose is this?” for orders, POs, tickets and numbering. The branch list screen is Company branches. |
| Where | Branches are picked (not created) all over the product — order entry, purchasing, reports; the records themselves live on the Company Branches screen. |
| Who | Read this before setting up users (every user has a branch) or stock (every warehouse belongs to one); the structure is usually decided by management/IT at setup time. |
| When | At initial company setup, before users and warehouses exist. Single-site companies still have exactly one branch — flagged as the Home Office. |
| Why it matters | Branch ownership drives document numbering, report scoping and (with user branch/alt-branches) data visibility. Retrofitting a branch structure after years of single-branch data is painful — decide it early. |
If your company has no branches — the single-branch case
Most smaller customers operate from one place and never set a branch up. They still have
one, because the system creates it for them. ACS is a good example: a single branch
called Headquarters, flagged as the Home Office.
In this shape, branches are effectively invisible:
- Every order, purchase order and ticket belongs to that one branch automatically.
- Every user sees everything, because there is nothing else to see.
- Reports do not split by branch, because there is only one column of numbers.
- You never need to open the Company Branches screen.
You do not have to do anything to get this. If a company’s database has no branch at all,
one named Main Branch is created and flagged Home Office the next time the server
starts. If it has branches but none is flagged, the lowest-numbered one is promoted. If two
somehow end up flagged, all but the lowest are cleared. The rule looks after itself.
Even a one-branch company needs its single branch flagged as the Home Office. It is where
anything with no branch of its own is counted, it is what the proposal reports print in the
letterhead, and it is the fallback whenever a branch cannot be determined.
If your company has several branches — the multi-branch case
For example, a company might run four, each with a short code used in document numbering:
| Code | Branch | Role | Orders |
|---|---|---|---|
| L | Head Office | Home Office | 142 |
| ISL | East | branch | 20 |
| ISLP | West | branch | 9 |
| K | North | branch | 10 |
Once there is more than one branch, the branch starts doing real work:
| What | How the branch is involved |
|---|---|
| Orders | Each order carries the branch that owns it. Order lists, counts and dashboards are filtered by it, so a East user sees East’s work. |
| Document numbers | The branch Code is used when building order and PO numbers, which is why the codes are short (L, ISL). |
| Purchase orders & RFQs | Raised against the buying branch, so spend can be attributed to the location that committed it. |
| Who sees what | Each user has a primary branch, and may be given alternate branches for people who cover more than one location. Managers and administrators can be given visibility across all of them. |
| Warehouses | Warehouses are linked to a branch, and a branch has a default Goods Warehouse its stock is drawn from. |
| Service | Tickets, teams and staff belong to a branch, so service workload can be measured per location. |
| Pricing | A branch can carry its own cost markup and price markup, letting a location that is more expensive to run charge accordingly. |
| Reports | The Home Office supplies the company details printed on commercial proposals; other reports break figures down per branch. |
Records with no branch
Older records — created before branches were used, or imported — can have no branch of
their own. These are not lost: anything without a branch is
treated as belonging to the Home Office, so it still appears in the main branch’s lists
and totals rather than vanishing.
Going forward the branch is required: new records must be given a real branch, and
the screens will not let you save one without. The historical records are left exactly as they
are rather than being quietly reassigned, so genuinely unknown history stays distinguishable
from work that really was the Home Office’s.
Growing from one branch to many
Adding your second branch is the moment branches start to matter. A sensible order:
- Create the new branch (OJ Setup → Product Setup → Company Branches)
with a short code, and leave the existing one as the Home Office. - Link the new branch’s warehouses, and set its default Goods Warehouse.
- Give each user a primary branch, and alternates for anyone covering both. Until
you do, everyone still behaves as before. - Assign sales reps, service staff and service teams to their branch
on their own screens. - Set branch markups only if that location genuinely prices differently.
You cannot delete the Home Office, and you cannot clear the Home Office flag without giving it
to another branch — a company must always have exactly one. You also cannot delete a branch
that is still in use: if orders, customer addresses, sales reps, service staff or users still
point at it, the delete is refused and tells you what is holding it. Move those first.