Shipping multi-entity: why one workspace wasn't enough
Behind the biggest change we've shipped since v1. Here's why multi-entity ops matters, and how we rebuilt the data model.
November 2, 2024 · Maya Laurent
For the first three years of Halvert, one workspace was the unit of a company. It’s the model most SaaS tools assume. It’s also wrong for anyone running more than one legal entity, and that turned out to be a lot of our customers.
The shape of the problem
Half of our Pro-tier customers operate across two or more entities. They’d been solving it with duplicated workspaces, a lot of Slack copy-pasting, and a hand-rolled spreadsheet that nobody owned.
What we rebuilt
- Entity as a first-class object. Every transaction now belongs to exactly one entity, with parent-child relationships for groups.
- Cross-entity reporting. Board decks now roll up automatically across every entity in a group.
- Approval routing by entity. Rules stay local. The German entity’s CFO never sees the US entity’s approvals.
What’s next
FX reconciliation across entities is the next thing on the roadmap. If you have a treasury team that stares at a 14-tab spreadsheet every Friday, we want to talk.