How to connect Companies and subsidiaries

Kimberley Cote

I'm wondering how other organizations handle companies that have subsidiaries, branches, other offices, etc. So like a large Energy Group of companies that has a ton of various offices, how do you control those records in RE? i.e. how are they tied via relationship, etc.

Tom Klimchak

You'll probably get a multitude of answers on this one, but here's what have begun doing:


We'll usually have one "main" company record and then when we start creating branch/franchise records we setup a relationship between the two organization records as "Subsidiary" and "Parent Corporation".... I might change that to "Parent Organizatin", but you get the idea.


This allows us to still treat each branch/franchise as a separate location, but we can kind of keep track of which org records belong to a parent organization.  


Note: this does NOT magically join together all their giving records for recognition purposes, but you could, in theory, do that if you go to the General 2 tab of the relationship and check to have all of the subsidiary's gifts automatically soft credit the Parent Organization record.  Then you just have to exclude all the branches from your recognition list of donors.


This is usually a hot topic and it's probably be discussed in other forum posts, so be sure to search to see what others have said, too.  I like questions like this because you usually get a few different opinions 


 

Kimberley Cote:

I'm wondering how other organizations handle companies that have subsidiaries, branches, other offices, etc. So like a large Energy Group of companies that has a ton of various offices, how do you control those records in RE? i.e. how are they tied via relationship, etc.

 

Caitlin Gilmore

Tom Klimchak:

You'll probably get a multitude of answers on this one, but here's what have begun doing:


We'll usually have one "main" company record and then when we start creating branch/franchise records we setup a relationship between the two organization records as "Subsidiary" and "Parent Corporation".... I might change that to "Parent Organizatin", but you get the idea.


This allows us to still treat each branch/franchise as a separate location, but we can kind of keep track of which org records belong to a parent organization.  


Note: this does NOT magically join together all their giving records for recognition purposes, but you could, in theory, do that if you go to the General 2 tab of the relationship and check to have all of the subsidiary's gifts automatically soft credit the Parent Organization record.  Then you just have to exclude all the branches from your recognition list of donors.


This is usually a hot topic and it's probably be discussed in other forum posts, so be sure to search to see what others have said, too.  I like questions like this because you usually get a few different opinions 


 

Kimberley Cote:

I'm wondering how other organizations handle companies that have subsidiaries, branches, other offices, etc. So like a large Energy Group of companies that has a ton of various offices, how do you control those records in RE? i.e. how are they tied via relationship, etc.

 

 

We do the same thing. Under relationships, we have Parent Organization for the starting company and subsidiary for it's branches. For places that don't have a rank like two different offices, we've put "partner" in both relationship fields (this may eventually change).

Lauren Burgess

Kimberley Cote:

I'm wondering how other organizations handle companies that have subsidiaries, branches, other offices, etc. So like a large Energy Group of companies that has a ton of various offices, how do you control those records in RE? i.e. how are they tied via relationship, etc.

We considered the option of creating a Parent/Branch Relationship, but for the companies we'd need to do this for, it would overwhelm the Relationship tab (e.g.) we already have 200+ alumni employees linked to ABC company and if we add the 100+ branches, you can imagine how crazy the record would be (and how slow to open!).


We have not found a brilliant solution, but we do use the Parentcorp field on the Org2 tab. We also added an Alias called "Parent Corp" and we type the constituent ID of the parent in this field. It makes it useful when running gift reports/queries because you can easily pull in all related records. The biggest issue we've had with this is data entry - remembering to add this alias when a new branch is created. Otherwise, it seems to work pretty well.