Partner Companies
In this article we will describe how to set up partner companies in Moment, and how to use them
First, you need to remember that Partner Companies in Moment is a Moment PRO feature and is not available for all customers. Please see our pricing page for more info.
The main features of partner companies are the following:
Sync of hours between projects in two different companies (useful for internal invoicing)
Project leaders can see live the amount of hours registered on the projects, allowing for easy control of resources. In other words reporting is updated in real-time. No need to wait for delivery of hours lists from consultants/external-co-workers
Sharing of resources between companies (co-workers can participate in projects across companies)
Sharing of number series, projects, travel expenses, routines, hourly rates and customers
Moment's customizable access control gives you flexibility so you can invite external co-workers (consultants) to work across your companies and projects without exposing all your sensitive data
Cross-company task availability
If you are in doubt whether partner companies is a solution for you, please contact our customer consultants or our support team.
We are also able to import existent partner companies structures or create a new one between companies through import of data. This may incur extra costs to import. Please read our Data Import Terms.
Setting up partner companies in Moment
To set up partner companies, you need to be an administrator in all companies involved. The following steps need also to be repeated by every company that will be in the group. You need to also contact our support to register your partner company group.
First go to Settings > General > Partner Companies and enable Partner Companies
This will give a new option in Moment under Setup > General > Partner Companies
In here you can start adding the companies that will be part of your group
On the left side, you will be able to add new companies, on the right side, you can confirm the companies once you have added them.
By clicking "Add new" on the right side, you can add the database name to add the company to your group. The database name can be found in the URL when you are logged in Moment:
Once you have added the database name, you will be able to see the company on the left side, mark :
The next step, involves changing to the other database.
It is also important to remember that both companies need to exist in each other databases as customers.
Once the steps above have been repeated. Go to the Partner Companies setting page, and choose a customer to attach each database to. This is very simple:
Once this has been done in each of the databases that will be connected to the group, please contact our support team. Then, we will create the group in our database and the process will be complete.
Number Series for Partner Companies
When Partner Companies is enabled you will have other choices for deciding the way in which some number series in Moment are going to work.
These settings are simple, they allow you to decide whether you wish to use the number series inherited from the main company, or keep using the same as before.
Sharing of customer data
If Partner Companies is enabled, you have the option to share customer data across companies.
When you register a new customer within a Partner Company group, you will a prompt like this:
By clicking on the highlighted text, you will get the following infobox:
This infobox indicates that the customer already exists in another company in the group and the status is active.
When the customer is created, and it already exists in another company in the group, info such as organization number and contact persons will be available:
Project setup in Partner Companies
The most important feature in Partner Companies, is the ability for projects to be shared among different companies that also use Moment. However there are certain rules when Partner Companies is enabled that need to be followed for projects to be set up. In this article we will show how to set up projects in Partner Companies.
Create a project in the main company
First, create a normal project in the database from which you wish to invoice the final customer. This will be the "main company" in this case.
The project is created as any other in Moment. If in doubt, please read this article
Inviting co-workers from other companies
Once the project has been created, go to resources > co-workers > add a new co-worker
here you will have to invite the co-workers you wish to add to your projects. If you wish to add all co-workers from one company to another as external co-workers we might be able to assist you. In that case please contact support.
Write the e-mail address of the co-worker. Moment will match this to any existing accounts and you will be able to invite them to your database. You do not need the co-workers to answer this e-mail for you to add them to projects. Once the invitation is sent you can proceed.
Adding the co-workers
After you have invited the external co-workers, you can add them to the project as you would with any other co-worker:
it is important to remember that co-workers, internal or not, MUST be added from the main project in order to work correctly.
After you add a co-worker, a link to an external project will immediately be created, although you might need to refresh the page to see it:
If the name of the external project shows up (red square in the screenshot above), then it means that the link between companies has been successful.
How will my co-workers register hours?
We can conclude that when a shared project is created, in fact, two projects are created, one main project, and a secondary project in any company from which you have retreived co-workers.
For the individual co-workers, what they see when they log in to Moment may vary. Depending on the way your access control and login works. Some co-workers m,ight be able to choose which database to use. For them, it might look like this:
In this case, it means that the co-worker in reality has access to three companies. However, the main point is that regardless of company affiliation, the co-workers must always register hours in their main company.
The co-worker will be able to easily identify that they are registering hours correctly, by loking at his/her timesheet. In this screenshot you can see how the project will look like in the timesheet, the project name has a distinct icon next to it:
This is a very important point. If hours are registered only in the main project, then hours will be registstered in the main company. This means that internal invoicing will not work, hours balance is incorrect and so forth. In general, contact our support team if you are in doubt regarding whether you Partner Companies setup is correct.
Which values are inherited between the main project and the secondary project?
When partner companies is set up, and a shared project is created, values are inherited from the main project to the secondary project in the other companies. Activities will be copied, as they need to be the same in both projects in order for the hours registration and sync to work correctly.
Milestones from the main project will also be transferred to the secondary project, although will not be visible in the Project Plan
It is also possible to set up the price models in such a way that you can base the price model of the secondary project on the values from the price model. This is an option enabled on the secondary project:
In this way you can easily set up internal invoicing between companies.
If your company group uses travel expenses, and you want to reinvoice the claim to the final customer, you can enable the option to "share expenses". Then any project expenses registered by a co-worker on a daughter project will be cloned to the main project. This means you can internally invoice the expense between companies and the end customer without needing to copy the expense manually.
How to control if the hours sync between companies and projects is correct?
Before you invoice the final customer from the main project. It is a good idea to cross-check that hours have been synced correctly. This will help you spot any errors before invoicing and give you time to correct these.
These steps should be performed by an admin in both companies. That is, has full access to all the functionalities in Moment.
First, use the hours report in the main company, and create a report that shows all the hours that : have not been invoiced or have the status "not approved" or "approved. This will give you an overview of all the hours worked during a certain period.
Then, make sure that the report includes the hours for all external co-workers in the project. This way you will only be looking at hours from the secondary project:
This will give you in total a report that gives all the hours synced for external workers in the main project. What is of interest in this setting is the total amount of hours. Make sure to note this number.
Second. Write the same report from the secondary project, only this time it is not necessary to do exclude workers, let he Internal/external co-workers field stay ticked for "all". This report will give you all the hours that should have been synced to the main project. As in the first report. Make sure to look at the totals, these should be the same. If they are not, please contact support and we can help you cross-check this.
Be aware that any errors in sync that are due to erroneous setup of partner companies, usually entails deleting the hours that have been registered and then adding the hours correctly manually in the timesheet of the relevant co-workers
Sharing tasks between partner companies
A recent feature we have implemented allows for sharing of tasks between partner companies. In this way you can have an easy overview of your assigned tasks without having to change company databases.
To enable this, make sure that this setting is turned on under setup > settings > partner companies
At the moment, the functionality works by displaying all the tasks corresponding to the specific companies int he group under Tasks > Taskboard. Be sure to mark checkboxes both "All" and the correct company in the Company Group
This feature is still a Work in Progress and as such it is still under revision. Although parts of the core functionality are available, it is still subject to change.
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