Flexible franchising
No two franchises are alike. Erply’s cloud-based franchising tools allow you to choose how much control your franchisees have over business processes, no matter how complex your setup is.
Centralized franchise management
Define franchise-wide rules from the master HQ account, including customer information, POs, loyalty points, store credit, promotions, discounts, and more.
Franchise-wide reporting
Create in-depth reports and analytics for your entire franchise or for a few select locations. Reports can be set up to automatically sync from each franchise account to HQ.
An Erply franchise chain, in a nutshell, is a collection of individual Erply accounts.
Each account in this collection functions as a normal Erply account, and has the same feature set, settings, and permission structure.
Each account has a unique ID (account number), and separate login credentials.
When we set up a chain, we will designate one of these as the HQ (headquarters) account. This is owned by the franchisor (company headquarters) and it is used to manage the company-wide product catalog.
Other accounts will be "store accounts", owned by franchisees.
Finally, one account will be designated as the “reporting account”. Sales and other documents will be collected from individual stores to the reporting account, and this is where the franchisor sees the performance of stores and products across the whole company.
Our recommended setup is to have one account per franchisee.
Company-owned stores can be located either in a designated store account, or directly in HQ.
Sometimes we have also recommended to have one account per location, especially when:
Erply offers a choice between two franchise models:
The whole chain has to use one or the other. It is not possible to mix the two approaches.
During onboarding, we clarify the requirements with you and help to identify which approach is the best for your company.
Taking product catalog as an example, the two models work as follows:
Please note that the syncing is unidirectional: from HQ to stores only. There is no syncing up to HQ — or between the stores. This makes the model inappropriate, most importantly, for sharing customers. New customers are typically added, and customer records updated, at store level (from POS), not from HQ.
So customer database must either be fully "shared" between accounts, or each store must have its own individual customer database. Going with the “Synchronize from HQ” model means there will not be a centralized customer database.
Is there a limit on the number of accounts?
No, once the number of accounts needed is agreed upon dev and operations setup the customer so whatever resources required to support the customer size.
Can other Franchisee’s see other account reports?
No, the specified data is shared across accounts. Reporting is limited to the franchisee and what is synced to the HQ account.