Running training across franchises, branches and client organisations

A franchise group, a business with dozens of sites, an industry association and a training provider with many client organisations all face the same problem: one set of training standards, many places that deliver them. Head office wants consistency and a single view of who’s trained. Each site wants to run its own people without waiting on head office. This guide covers how to set up multi-site and franchise training so both can happen, and how Acadenix’s organisation tree handles it.

Why multi-site training is harder than it looks

• Consistency versus local control. Brand standards and compliance courses must be the same everywhere, but each site has its own inductions, equipment and procedures.
• Local administrators. Site managers need to enrol and support their staff without seeing other sites’ people or changing group settings.
• Branding. A franchise usually wants one brand everywhere, while a training provider’s clients each want their own logo, colours and web address.
• Reporting. Head office needs a roll-up across regions; each site manager needs their own list of who’s overdue.
• People move. Staff transfer between sites, and their completions and certificates need to follow them.
• Growth. New sites and clients need the right courses and settings from their first day.

Design your organisation structure first

Decide the shape before you load a single course. A useful test: a level earns its place if someone administers it, it needs different settings, or you want to report on it separately. If none of those apply, it’s a report filter or a job title, not an organisation.

A franchise or multi-site group might look like this:

• Group head office: owns brand and compliance courses and sets group-wide defaults
  • Queensland region: the regional manager reports across its sites
    • Brisbane CBD store
    • Gold Coast store
  • New South Wales region
    • Parramatta store
    • Newcastle store
  • Support office: head office’s own staff

A training provider selling to businesses often has one level per client, with the client’s sites or departments beneath:

• Training provider
  • Client A
    • Warehouse
    • Head office
  • Client B

Keep the tree as shallow as your management structure allows. Every extra level is another place a setting can be overridden and another filter on every report. Expect change, too: regions merge and franchisees buy more stores, so moving a branch shouldn’t mean rebuilding it.

Decide what’s central and what’s local

A good default is to set things once at the top, let them flow down, and override only for a reason: a separate legal entity, a separate brand or a separate identity provider. Agree who may override what, and write it down.

Share courses, don’t copy them

Copies drift. When the same course lives in fifty places, every update has to be made fifty times, and reports compare fifty slightly different courses. Build each shared course once, at the level that owns it, and distribute it down:

• Share to everyone by default, and exclude the branches that shouldn’t have it, such as sites that don’t offer a particular service.
• Make sure new sites added under an included region get the course automatically.
• Let receiving sites add their own courses alongside, but not edit the shared one.
• When a site stops receiving a course, decide whether learners part-way through may finish.

Delegate administration

Give every site at least one local administrator, and give people who run training, but shouldn’t touch settings or billing, a narrower role. Head office should be able to step into any site to help, and every action should be recorded against the person who took it. Avoid shared logins for site managers: they make an audit trail meaningless.

Report across sites

Agree the questions before you build reports: who’s overdue at each site, which regions are behind on a mandatory course, and which certificates lapse next month. Then check the structure answers them. Region-level organisations make region-level reports easy. Each manager should see their own branch and everything beneath it, and nothing beside it.

How Acadenix’s organisation tree works

Acadenix is built around a tree of organisations that nest to any depth.

Structure

• View your organisations as a list or a tree. Create one beneath yours, or invite a contact to set up their own organisation beneath yours as its first administrator.
• Move an organisation to a new parent with a preview of what changes for sign-in, courses and licences. Everything beneath it moves too.
• Archive a branch with everything beneath it. Its people can’t sign in until you restore it, and nothing is deleted.

Settings that flow down

Branding, the mail server, legal texts, notification emails, built-in sign-in methods, AI help and localisation are inherited. Each setting shows what’s in effect and where it comes from (local, inherited or the Acadenix default), and warns “Changing this affects” with a count before a change reaches organisations beneath. Every override is recorded in the activity log. Email registration domains, custom domains (on Gold, up to five per organisation) and SAML connections are each organisation’s own; see our SAML single sign-on guide.

Courses, roles and reports

• Share a course with all sub-organisations or selected ones, setting any branch to This and everything under it, This organisation only, Excluded or Inherit. The nearest rule wins, organisations added later beneath an included branch get the course automatically, and you preview what’s added and removed before saving. If learners would lose the course, you choose whether they can finish. Receiving organisations can’t edit it, but can switch off new enrolments for themselves.
• Roles are Admin, Instructor and Learner. Administrators see only their own organisation and those beneath it, and instructors run training without settings, billing or structure. Every active organisation keeps at least one administrator of its own. Administrators can switch into any organisation beneath theirs, with a “Currently roaming” bar showing where they are.
• Reports cover your organisation and everything beneath it, filtered to one branch when you need it, with saved filters, and CSV export on Silver and Gold.
• An administrator can move a person to another organisation beneath theirs and keep their learning history. Learners can also ask to copy their history from another organisation in the group, which that organisation’s administrators approve.

On Silver and Gold, training providers and partners can sell courses, or Acadenix itself, down the same tree; see reselling Acadenix.

Key takeaways

• Design the hierarchy first: a level exists because someone administers it, it needs different settings, or you report on it.
• Set defaults once at the top and override only for a clear reason, such as a separate brand, legal entity or identity provider.
• Share one version of each course down the tree instead of copying it.
• Give every site a local administrator, and scope what each person sees to their own branch.
• Make sure records follow people when they move between sites.

Planning training across many sites or clients? Request an evaluation and try it with a few branches, or talk to us about your structure.