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Run multiple offices in one workspace
Split project ownership across studios without splitting the firm into separate workspaces. Create offices, assign projects to them, and know which office a new project lands in by default.
What you'll achieve
Turn on offices so projects can be organised by studio instead of firm-wide, without disturbing anything for a firm that only ever needs one.
You'll end up with: One or more active offices, with projects assigned to the right one and new projects defaulting sensibly.
Before you start
One office until you say otherwise
Every organisation in Monument already has an office, whether you've ever looked at one or not. It's created automatically the moment the organisation exists, and every project you've ever made already belongs to it. For a firm working out of a single location, that's the whole story: nothing about offices shows up anywhere, because there's nothing to choose between yet.
Offices exist to answer one question: which studio does this project, invoice or report actually belong to? A firm with one location already knows the answer without asking, so Monument doesn't ask. The office picker on a project, the option to run a separate invoice sequence per office, the ability to connect a second accounting system, all of it stays out of sight until you create a second office. The single exception is the Offices page itself in Settings, which is always there, waiting for the day the firm outgrows one address.
Northlight Architects has been running Melbourne and Sydney studios out of one Monument workspace for a while, tagging projects and people Melbourne Office and Sydney Office to tell them apart in reports. Real offices give the same practice a proper home for that split: an actual entity a project belongs to, not a label someone has to remember to type.
Create the second office
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Open Settings and select the Offices tab.
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Click Create.
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Enter a Name (Sydney Office) and an optional Code, a short identifier that shows up on reports.
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Click Create office to save it.
That's the entire setup step. As soon as a second active office exists, the office picker on a project, the per-office invoice sequence toggle, and the per-office accounting connection list all appear on their own, everywhere they're relevant.
A new office starts with just a Name and a Code. Its billing identity, the legal name, ABN, logo and payment details that let it issue documents under its own name, is a separate step you do afterward by editing the office. See Give each office its own billing identity.
Assign a project to its office
Once a second office exists, every project gets an Office field on its Info tab: which office is responsible for this project. It's a plain picker, no typing, listing every active office in the firm.
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Open a project and go to its Info tab.
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Click Edit, then open the Office field and pick Sydney Office.
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Save. The project now belongs to Sydney rather than the firm's default.
A project always belongs to some office, from the moment it's created, whether you set one or not. Build a project from scratch without picking an office, and Monument reaches for your own home office first, the one set on your resource profile, before falling back to the organisation's default office, the oldest still-active one, the same one that quietly held every project before offices existed at all. Build a project from a template instead, and the template's own office takes priority over yours: it inherits whichever office the template project itself belongs to, so a firm that keeps a Sydney-flavoured template automatically hands Sydney's new work to Sydney no matter who's creating it, only reaching for the creator's home office, then the organisation default, if the template itself has no office.
Change a project's office any time, work does move between studios. What that reassignment does and doesn't affect is worth understanding before you rely on it: see Give each office its own billing identity for what happens to documents already raised against the old office.
Archive an office, don't delete it
There's no delete button on an office, only archive. Archiving takes an office out of the running for new work, new projects can't be assigned to it and it drops out of the picker, while everything already stamped with it, past projects, past invoices, keeps its history intact. Restoring an archived office brings it straight back into circulation.
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On the Offices tab, find the office you want to retire.
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Click the archive icon in its row. Its state badge switches from Active to Archived.
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To bring it back later, click the same icon, now showing a restore arrow.
Monument won't let you archive the last active office. The archive button disables itself and explains why: at least one office has to remain active, so there's always somewhere for a project without an explicit assignment to land.
Troubleshooting
- The Office field isn't showing up on a project. It only appears once a second active office exists. With just the one default office, there's nothing to pick between, so Monument doesn't show the field at all.
- Can't archive an office. If it's the only active one left, the archive action is disabled on purpose. Create or restore another office first, then archive this one.
- A project shows "Not set" for its office even though offices exist. That project predates the office it should have, or was created without an explicit pick and the resolved default hasn't been set on it. Open its Info tab and assign one directly.
Where this fits next
An office on its own is just a name a project points to. Give it real substance next: Give each office its own billing identity covers its legal name, ABN and logo, and how invoices remember the office they were raised under. Projects aren't the only thing that can belong to an office, give your people a home office too, so new projects default sensibly and reports can split by studio. Once that's set up, break reports and accounting down by office shows how the same split reaches reporting and your accounting connection.