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Why multi-location clients need something different
A client with eight offices, or a holding company with several subsidiaries, has people with very different needs:
- Group leadership wants totals: how many tickets are open across every office, which sites are behind on compliance, what the whole group spends.
- Site managers want their own office's tickets and devices, without wading through everyone else's.
- Some people sit in between, such as a regional manager responsible for three of the eight offices.
Without proper support for this, MSPs end up with workarounds that clients notice: separate logins for each location, a single shared view where everyone sees everything, or the MSP compiling cross-site summaries by hand whenever leadership asks.
Two ways to model a multi-location client
There are two common approaches, and the right one depends on how the client is set up in your PSA and billing.
| Approach | Works well when | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| One company with several sites | Locations share one contract and invoice, and site is mostly a label on tickets and devices | Limited ability to separate data, permissions and reporting per site |
| Parent company with child companies | Locations or subsidiaries are separate companies in your PSA, with their own agreements, invoices or compliance needs | Each child needs to be linked to its PSA company, and cross-company access has to be granted deliberately |
Many MSPs already have subsidiaries set up as separate companies in their PSA for billing reasons. A portal that supports parent and child companies can follow that structure instead of forcing a choice between one giant company and disconnected logins.
What good multi-location access looks like
When evaluating a portal for these clients, check for:
- One login with a company switcher. Authorised users pick one location or a combined view without signing out.
- Combined views. Tickets, devices, invoices and compliance totalled across the locations the user may access.
- Explicit, per-person scope. Being at the parent company should not automatically expose every subsidiary. The MSP should choose all child companies or only selected ones for each person.
- Per-location and group-wide reporting. One report for a single office, or one that rolls up every location for the board.
- Clear behaviour when a new location is added. Know whether existing group-level users see it automatically.
How MSPortal handles parent and child companies
MSPortal supports parent and child companies as part of its enterprise management feature. The parent-company access guide explains the setup in detail. In short:
- Link the companies. In Settings > Companies, set a parent company for each child. MSPortal creates a Parent Admin role for every company that has children.
- Grant group access explicitly. Add a client user from the parent company to that Parent Admin role. MSPortal adds the role on every child company, and the user gets a company selector listing their own company, each child company and a Global View.
- Limit scope where needed. For each Parent Admin, choose all child companies, which includes children linked later, or only selected companies. The choice applies to the company selector, pages, reports, API and MCP access.
- Keep everyone else local. Users who are not Parent Admins see only their own company. Within a company, ticket display groups can further limit people to their own tickets or their own location's.
What clients get from this:
- One login for every location the user is allowed to access, with instant switching between them.
- Combined views of tickets, devices, invoices and compliance across child companies, as well as single-company views.
- Group reports: one parent-company report can cover every child location, or you can report per office.
- Compliance across the organisation, showing which locations are ahead and which need attention.
Two practical notes. A user's permissions group controls what they can do, but which companies they see comes from the Parent Admin role, so an admin-level permissions group alone does not add child companies. And each child company still needs to be mapped to its own PSA company, because the parent and child link does not replace integration mappings. Available filters and combined views vary by page and integration.
To see company switching with sample data, book a demo.
Related questions
Can a user at one location see other locations' data?
Only if the MSP grants it. In MSPortal, users see their own company by default. Cross-company access comes from the Parent Admin role, which the MSP can limit to selected child companies.
What happens when a client opens a new office?
The MSP links the new company to its parent. In MSPortal, Parent Admins set to all child companies see the new office automatically, while those limited to selected companies only see it once it is added to their list.
Can one report cover every location?
Yes, in portals with parent and child support. MSPortal can produce a parent-company report that covers every child location, alongside reports for individual offices.
What should an MSP client portal include?
Ticket status, documentation, reports, compliance, devices and invoices, with per-user permissions and branding. See What should an MSP client portal include?