What's Per-Office and What's Company-Wide

Know before you change it: which MonuDesk settings belong to one office and which apply to every branch at once.

Written By Dennis Rodin

Last updated 15 days ago

Once your company has more than one office, every setting in MonuDesk falls into one of two buckets: it either belongs to one office, or it applies to the whole company. Getting this wrong is the most common multi-office surprise. You change a price at the north branch and it changes at the south branch too, or you connect QuickBooks once and wonder why the other office never syncs.

The short rule: money, records and connections are per office. Rules, catalogs and how MonuDesk behaves are company-wide.

None of this applies to a single-office company. MonuDesk hides the office switcher and every per-location control until a second active office exists.

Per office

These belong to one location. Change them at one office and the others are untouched.

  • Orders and quotes. Every order and quote is filed under the office it was created in. An order can be moved to another office later with Change Location on the order, which regenerates its invoice, quote and contract under the new office's name and address and voids the records already created in QuickBooks under the old one. The voided documents stay visible, so the paper trail is intact.

  • Contacts and cemeteries. Both are created into your active office. A wholesale customer can be marked as belonging to all locations instead.

  • Inventory quantities and prices. The item catalog itself is shared (one master row per item) but retail price, wholesale price, quantity and reorder point can be overridden per office, and an item can be switched off at one location. Editing while a specific office is selected saves those four fields to that office only.

  • Custom line item prices. In Settings → Custom Line Items each item has a Different prices per location switch. Off, every office uses the single price. On, you set a price per office and blanks fall back to that default. In a new quote, the selected location's price is applied automatically.

  • The QuickBooks connection. Each office holds its own QuickBooks Online connection, its own customer field mapping and its own income account mappings, and its own Sync inventory changes to QuickBooks switch. In Settings → Integrations a Managing location selector at the top decides which office you are configuring. Connecting one office does nothing for the others.

  • The office address, email and phone. This is what fills the From block on customer-facing PDFs. See the documents section below.

  • The office's default tax rate. Each location carries its own Default tax rate percentage in Settings → Office Locations. An order's rate is resolved in order: a rate typed by hand on the order, then the cemetery's county or zone rate, then this location default, then the company-wide Sales Tax %. The tooltip on the order's tax line names which source is being used.

  • The office logo. Each location has its own Logo field in Settings → Office Locations, on the form where you add or edit a location. Upload any image up to 5MB, check it against the checkerboard preview, then download or delete it (click the thumbnail itself to swap the image), and use the background eraser if your logo arrives with a solid white box around it. A Left / Center / Right control sets where it prints, with a live preview. An office's own logo beats the company logo, and an office with no logo of its own falls back to the company one.

  • Per-location contact labels. A buyer can carry a label tying them to a specific office, which also routes them to the right location in QuickBooks.

  • Team assignments. Each team member is assigned to one or more offices in Settings → Team Members, and only sees those offices' records.

  • The order and quote numbering counter. Each office runs its own sequence and carries its own location number, so the second office's first order is L2-ORD-1, not a continuation of the first office's count.

Company-wide

These are set once and every office gets them. There is no per-office version, so changing one of these at any branch changes it everywhere.

  • Pipeline stages. One board layout for the whole company, including which stages show on the customer portal.

  • To-dos and workflow steps. The to-do templates that get attached to orders.

  • Card display. What each order card shows on the board - header, subtitle and body rows.

  • Order deadline alerts. The yellow and red day thresholds, and the on/off switch.

  • Quote price guarantee. The number of days a quote's price holds, and whether the guarantee is on.

  • Company Profile, including the fallback Sales Tax % and the company logo. That logo is used on every office's documents unless that office has uploaded a logo of its own.

  • Counties and zones, and the tax rates attached to them.

  • The location prefix letter. The letter in front of the location number (L by default, giving L1, L2) is one company-wide setting in Settings → Company Profile → Order & Quote Numbering. The office numbers are assigned automatically. The ORD and QTE prefixes are company-wide too.

  • Role presets and permissions. A role means the same thing at every branch. Location access is what narrows a person down, not their role.

  • Vendors, and the option lists a quote is built from: granite colors, vases, photos, letterings, carvings, etchings and custom service types.

  • MonuPay. One merchant connection for the company, with one processing fee setting.

  • Email communication settings, including the sender display name and reply-to address. Be aware of where a customer's reply actually lands: the quote email, the stage-update email and the payment reminder all reply to the team member assigned to the order. When no one is assigned, they fall back to the office email address, then the company one.

  • Four QuickBooks settings, even though the connection itself is per office: Order document type (Invoice, Sales Receipt or Both, and the screen itself says "Applies to all offices"), Income account entry type (Invoice Entry or Journal Entry), Sync Quotes to QuickBooks, and Dimension order in QuickBooks. That last one tells MonuDesk which of the three numbers in a QuickBooks item name like "Bevel 24x10x4" is the width, which is the height and which is the thickness. All six orderings are offered and it starts on the familiar Width x Height x Thickness. Set it before your next import: it applies to all offices at once, and it changes future imports only, so items already in MonuDesk are left alone. MonuDesk also shows a Check dimension order before importing box with a worked example before every inventory import, whether you start it from the Settings panel or from the Import button on the Inventory page, and the import only runs once you click That's correct - import.

  • Which stages count as ready to install. The stage chips on Insights → Installations used to be personal, so two people in the same shop could each be working from a different list. They are one company setting now: whoever ticks a stage ticks it for everyone. Selections are remembered by the stage itself, so renaming a stage keeps it ticked, and until somebody picks, MonuDesk keeps working the list out from your pipeline exactly as before.

The one that catches people: your QuickBooks connection is per office, but how MonuDesk writes into QuickBooks is company-wide. Switch Order document type to Sales Receipt for one branch and every branch starts creating Sales Receipts.

Which name and address land on a document

Most documents carry the office the order belongs to, so the family sees the branch they walked into and your vendor sees the branch that placed the work. The shop ticket is the exception and carries the parent company.

The assigned office's name and address - used on the Quote, Invoice, Receipt and Contract. The office fills the From block and the office name prints in the page footer above "Powered by MonuDesk".

The logo prints on all seven documents. Each one uses its order's office logo, or the company logo from Settings → Company Profile when that office has none. With no logo in either place, documents look exactly as they did before.

The parent company's name and address - used on the Shop Ticket, regardless of which office the order belongs to. The Purchase Order and Foundation Order print the order's own office name and address in the From block, not the head company's.

The fallback works field by field, not all-or-nothing. If an office has a name but no phone number, the document uses the office name and the company's phone number. So a half-filled office record produces a document that mixes the two without telling you. Fill in each office's address, email and phone in Settings → Office Locations and check one generated invoice per office after you add a location.

Learn more: How MonuDesk Brands Your PDFs

Who sees what

The company owner always sees every active office. Everyone else sees only the offices they are assigned to, and MonuDesk blocks a record in an office they are not assigned to rather than showing it.

The office switcher in the top bar controls what you are looking at and where new records land. Pick a single office and lists, the dashboard and anything you create scope to it. Pick All Locations and you see everything you have access to at once. Your choice is remembered between sessions and devices.

Watch the switcher before you edit a per-office setting. Inventory prices, custom line item prices and the QuickBooks connection all save against the office in context, so the wrong office selected means the right change in the wrong place.

Setting up a second office

Adding the location is the first step, not the last. Work through this list and the new branch behaves like the first one:

  1. Fill in the address, email and phone on the location so its documents carry the right From block and footer.

  2. Assign your team. Nobody sees the new office until they are assigned to it in Settings → Team Members. Only the owner can change assignments.

  3. Connect that office's QuickBooks in Settings → Integrations, with the new office picked in the Managing location selector, then set its customer field mapping and income accounts.

  4. Set its inventory. The catalog is already shared; give the new office its own quantities, and override prices only where they genuinely differ.

  5. Set per-location custom line item prices for anything the new branch charges differently.

  6. Check one document. Create a test quote at the new office and generate the PDF. The From block and the footer should read the new office. If they read the parent company, a field on the location record is still empty.

Reminder: deactivating a location keeps it on your bill. Only archiving frees the paid slot.

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