Erply's franchises are groups of accounts that have been configured with a shared product catalog or a shared customer registry.
A franchise lets each store owner see only their own data—but the accounts can still be centrally managed, and the HQ has access to centralized reporting.
In such a chain, there are always users that must be able to access all store accounts. Separate logins for each account are difficult to manage; this article explains how to set up cross-franchise logins for these users.
As the first step, you need to describe your current franchise: which accounts does it contain? This setup only needs to be done once.
Note: the list of Accounts is strictly informative. This list is only used to lay out the screen where you grant permissions to users.
After the accounts have been defined, proceed to the third section on the page, titled “Franchise Users".
This user is now authorized to log in to multiple accounts. From the user's perspective, this is how it works:
Here are a few clarifications on how the feature works.
1. On store accounts, the employee and user records do not necessarily need to exist.
If the username or the employee record does not exist yet, logging in via login.erply.com will create it automatically.
2. Deleting a multi-account user from a store account does not have any effect.
On next login, the username will be re-created automatically.
3. When an HQ user is promoted into a “multi-account” user, all users with the same name in store accounts effectively get overwritten.
Such users can no longer log in with their old store password. Erply will notice that a multi-account user with the same name now exists, and will thus require the multi-account user’s password.
Often, that is the desired result. A corporate administrator who already had store usernames before, can now easily consolidate those.
But care must be taken if there is a possibility that the match could be accidental (eg. an HQ user “tom” is unrelated to a store user “tom” somewhere).
4. A multi-account user can update their own password—or their multi-factor authentication preferences—on any account.
The change will be made to the HQ record. But, for that to work, password must be changed in login.erply.com, not in back office. Back office password change does not have any effect.
5. Deleting a multi-account user from the HQ will delete the same username from store accounts, too.
6. All users, regular users and multi-account users alike, are still subject to store account’s MFA (Multi-factor authentication) and SSO (Single Sign-On) requirements, not the HQ reqirements.
If a store account requires MFA, then a multi-account user will also be asked to enroll an email address or an authenticator app. Those enrollments will follow the user everywhere, so the same email also works in other stores that require MFA.
In stores that do not require MFA, the user can log in with just username and password, the enrollments will be ignored.
Ultimately though, it would be preferable that the franchise enforces consistent multi-factor authentication or single sign-on rules across the chain.