Understanding Business Units

v2.20.1

Business Units (BUs) are one of the most powerful organisational features in Supracontrol. They allow large organisations to divide their Supracontrol deployment into separate, independently managed segments - similar to departments, regional offices, or business divisions - while still sharing a single system instance.

Path: Settings → Business Units

What is a Business Unit?

A Business Unit is a named container that groups together users (the people who work within this division) and locations (the physical or logical sites this division manages). Once a BU is defined, all data that flows through those locations - alarms, notifications, schedules, reports - can be scoped to that BU.

Example

Imagine a company with three offices: North Campus, South Campus, and HQ. You can create three Business Units - one per office - and assign the appropriate users and locations to each. The IT team at North Campus will only see devices, alarms, and reports for their office, even though a single Supracontrol installation serves all three.

The Business Unit hierarchy

Business Units support a parent-child hierarchy. A BU can have a parent BU, enabling you to model multi-level organisational structures.

Example Corporation
├── Europe
│   ├── Germany
│   │   ├── Berlin Office
│   │   └── Munich Office
│   └── France
│       └── Paris Office
└── Americas
    ├── USA
    │   ├── New York Office
    │   └── Los Angeles Office
    └── Canada
        └── Toronto Office

A BU Admin assigned to “Germany” would see users and locations in both “Berlin Office” and “Munich Office” (the children), but not “France” or any Americas locations.

BU properties

Property	Description
Name	The display name for the Business Unit (e.g. “North Campus”, “Finance Department”)
Description	Optional free-text description
Parent	The parent Business Unit, if this BU is a child in a hierarchy. Leave blank for a top-level BU
Locations	The locations assigned to this Business Unit. A location can only belong to one BU at a time
Users	The users assigned to this Business Unit. A user can belong to multiple BUs

How BU scoping works

When a resource (user, notification, schedule, report) is scoped to a Business Unit, only users within that BU (or its ancestors) can see and interact with that resource. BU Admins enforce this automatically. Administrators and Owners always have cross-BU visibility.

Location exclusivity

A location can only belong to one Business Unit at a time. When you assign a location to a BU, that location becomes unavailable in all other BUs. This prevents location overlap and ambiguity.

User membership

Unlike locations, a user can be a member of multiple Business Units. This is useful for users who manage multiple divisions.

BU Admin vs. Administrator

Aspect	Administrator (Level 2)	BU Admin (Level 7)
Scope	Full system - sees all BUs, all locations, all users	Only their assigned Business Unit(s)
User Management	Can create, edit, and delete any user	Can manage only users within their BU
Notifications	Can see and manage all notifications	Can only see and manage notifications in their BU
Schedules	Can see and manage all schedules	Can manage BU-scoped schedules; cannot edit global schedules
Business Units	Can create, edit, and delete any BU	Cannot create or delete BUs
Locations	Full access to all locations	Only sees locations assigned to their BU
System Settings	Full access (SMTP, SMS, Voice, etc.)	No access to system settings

Key rule: A BU Admin has administrator-level capabilities, but only within the walls of their assigned Business Unit. Think of it as a “department manager” role.

How Business Units affect notifications, schedules, and reports

Notifications created by a BU Admin are automatically scoped to their BU and are invisible to users in other BUs
Schedules created by a BU Admin are BU-scoped. Global schedules (created by Administrators) are visible but read-only to BU Admins
Scheduled Reports follow the same pattern - a BU Admin’s reports are BU-scoped

Typical use cases

Business Units are typically used when:

Multi-tenant deployments - multiple separate companies or clients share a single Supracontrol instance
Large enterprises - a single company with distinct divisions or regional offices that should not see each other’s data
Compliance requirements - data must be isolated between departments for regulatory or security reasons
Delegated administration - you want regional managers to administer their own users and notifications without giving them full system administrator access