Companies & locations

The commercial unit is the location, not the company. Payment terms, credit limit, tax exemption, approved addresses, allowed payment methods, catalog prices, PO rules and order-review rules all hang off a branch. A ten-branch customer is ten sets of settings.

A company is the account: the business name, the buyers, the paperwork. A location is a buying site — a branch, warehouse, jobsite or head office. A buyer always purchases for a location, and that location’s settings decide what they see and how they pay.

Start with one location per company. Create another when the same business genuinely orders under its own terms — a second branch, a second warehouse. Do not create extra locations just to store more delivery addresses; a location keeps a whole book of them.

Three ways an account opens

• Add company — you create the record yourself. Covered below.
• Convert a customer — a retail regular becomes a company, its first location and its first buyer in one step. See buyers & invitations.
• Approve an application — the business applies from your storefront and approval creates the company, its location and the applicant’s access. See wholesale applications.

For a migration, one spreadsheet can create many companies at once — see bulk import. Import creates only; it never updates a company that already exists.

Create a company

1. Go to Companies in the store sidebar and choose Add company.

2. Enter the business name.

3. Name the first location (it defaults to Main).

4. Review the defaults shown under the form. The first location starts at Pay at checkout and inherits your PO and order-submission defaults. Active online gateways are copied onto it.

5. Choose Create pending company. The private company page opens, ready for locations, addresses, terms and a catalog.

6. When the account is staged, choose Activate company. You can now add buyers. Ordering readiness still shows anything that must be fixed before a start-buying email is allowed.

The company is created Pending, Source: Manual. Pending is a staging state: no buyer can be granted access and no checkout can use the account. Activation is explicit, but it is not a promise that setup is complete—you may activate before adding the first buyer without creating a catch-22.

Caution

Check the spelling before you save. There is no company edit form. The business name, external ID and note are fixed at creation and cannot be changed afterwards. If the company has no orders and no drafts you can delete it and start again; once it has taken an order, delete is refused and you are stuck with the typo.

Locations

Open the company and use the Locations card.

• Add location takes a name and an optional External ID for your ERP or accounting system.
• Rename a location inline at any time. (Locations rename; companies do not.)
• Each location carries its own status: Active, On hold or Archived.

Everything commercial sits on the location, not the company:

On the location	Where you set it
Payment terms and deposit	Ordering, checkout and tax
Credit mode and credit limit	Credit policy
Tax exempt switch and Tax ID	Ordering, checkout and tax
PO number requirement	Ordering, checkout and tax
Order submission (direct or review)	Ordering, checkout and tax
Allowed online gateways and COD	Payment methods
Approved delivery addresses, billing contact	Addresses and billing contact
Catalog assignment	The catalog’s own Audience card

Sharma Distributors runs three branches. Pune head office is on Net 30 with a ₹5,00,000 limit; Nashik pays at checkout. A buyer at Nashik never sees Pune’s terms, Pune’s credit or Pune’s balance.

Approved addresses

Each location keeps a book of approved ship-to addresses and exactly one billing address. Manage both at Location → Addresses and billing contact.

Each address takes an Address name — “Hinjewadi Phase 2”, “Wakad Tower B” — because that name is what the buyer picks from a Ship to a company address dropdown at checkout, default first. Billing is not buyer-editable.

This is what makes one location enough for a customer with many delivery points. Vinayak Infra runs 40 jobsites off one buying location: the site engineer picks “Hinjewadi Phase 2” for an ₹86,000 order and the invoice still bills head office.

Two things to know at setup time:

• Because the create form does not collect an approved address, a brand-new location starts in one-time address mode — buyers may type a destination at checkout. Save an approved address, then switch one-time shipping off if you want approved-addresses-only ordering. The switch refuses while the book is empty.
• A Location admin at that branch can maintain the book themselves, so you are not editing addresses on their behalf. See buyer roles.

The full treatment — one-time shipping, archiving rules, who may edit, and where freight rates come from — is on delivery addresses & shipping.

Ordering readiness

A location can exist without yet being able to take an order. Each location card carries an amber Ordering incomplete banner listing every reason a buyer would be blocked, computed from the same rules checkout enforces.

Common reasons:

• No payment method — for a branch that places orders directly, no online gateway is ticked and no payment terms are configured. A branch that submits every order for review needs neither at the submission step.
• No shipping address — one-time shipping is off and the book has no active address.
• No active buyer — nobody with ordering access is attached.
• Credit decision required — deferred terms are selected without an explicit credit limit or an explicit Unlimited choice.
• Company or location not active — the lifecycle status is blocking commerce.

Fix what it names and reload. Nashik shows “Ordering incomplete: no payment method selected, no active buyer”; you tick Razorpay and add Ravi as a buyer, and the bar turns green.

Caution

The same check holds back the invitation email. Add a buyer to a branch that is not ready and the access grant is created, but nothing goes out — a toast says the invite email was not sent yet, and the Buyers table reads Not notified. A buyer who says the email never arrived is almost always a readiness failure, not a spam folder. See buyers & invitations.

Holds and statuses

Status	Effect
Pending (company)	Private staging. Configure the account, then use Activate company before adding buyers.
Active	Buyer access may be granted; each location still has to pass ordering readiness.
On hold	Buyers still sign in, see contract prices, view history and pay open invoices — but every new purchase is blocked.
Archived	No new commerce. Buyers become ordinary retail shoppers at retail prices. Existing orders and history are untouched.

Set the company’s status from the company header (Activate company, Put on hold, Reactivate, Archive, Delete). Each branch has its own status dropdown, so you can pause one site and leave the rest trading.

Holds take effect immediately, including for buyers who are already mid-checkout: the platform re-proves the account at payment start and again at order creation, so nothing slips through.

Note

Place hold on the Credit policy panel is a narrower hold. It takes a required reason and freezes new terms and deposit orders for that branch only — it does not stop a branch that has an online gateway ticked from paying at checkout, and every existing invoice stays collectible. Nirmal Traders is 40 days past due on ₹3,10,000: you place a hold with the reason “Over credit limit; awaiting payment”, and they can still pay you that ₹3,10,000. Use the company-level On hold when you want new buying to stop outright.

Deleting vs archiving

Delete exists for setup mistakes only. It works while a company has zero orders and zero drafts, and removes the company with its locations and setup history.

Once there is any commercial history, delete is refused — Archive instead. Archiving retires the account and preserves every order, invoice and audit record.