Businesses and multi-tenancy
A business is the top-level container in Sonta and the boundary around everything inside it — collections, records, team, agents, and settings. You can run as many businesses as you need from one account, and nothing crosses between them: separate data, separate access, separate configuration. That separation is what multi-tenancy means here.
Requirements: none to understand this; creating a business needs an account.
A business is the top level of Sonta — the container everything else lives in. Your collections and the records in them, the people on your team, the agents acting on your behalf, your locations and departments, your automations and connected services: all of it belongs to one business. Understanding this boundary is worth a few minutes, because it decides where your data lives, who can reach it, and how to structure things when you run more than one operation.
What belongs to a business
Practically everything. A business holds its own collections and every entry in them; its own team, roles, and permissions; its own locations and departments, with their working hours; its own automations, email connection, and integrations; and its own settings. None of these are shared globally — they are properties of one business. When you are working in Sonta, you are always working inside a business, even if you only ever have one.
The boundary is absolute
This is the part that matters most: nothing crosses from one business into another. Records do not span businesses. A role you hold in one grants you nothing in another. An agent connected to one cannot read or change anything in another. A collection built in one is not visible from the next. Two businesses under the same account are as separate as two businesses belonging to different companies.
That strictness is deliberate, and it is what the word multi-tenancy describes: one system serving many separate tenants, with a hard wall between them. It is what makes it safe to keep unrelated operations, or unrelated clients, in the same account without any risk that one leaks into another.
What a business is defined by
A business is described by a few things: its name, the industries it works in, and its address. These describe the business — they do not constrain what you can build inside it. Beyond that, a business can hold locations, and each location its own departments, which is how records stay separated by branch and by function within a single business, and how working hours are set for booking. Creating one is covered step by step in create your first business.
When to use more than one
Because businesses are fully isolated, the question of how many to run has a clear answer: one business per operation that should not see the others.
An agency running Sonta for its clients creates one business per client — each client's data sealed off, each with its own team access, none able to see another. A company with two unrelated brands keeps them apart the same way. But a single company operating from three cities does not need three businesses — that is what locations and departments are for, and they keep the shared model intact while separating records by branch. The test is simple: if the two things should share a model, a team, and reporting, they are one business with locations; if they should share nothing, they are separate businesses.
Working across businesses
A person can belong to several businesses, and switching between them is a deliberate act — you are in one at a time, and what you see is what that business holds. Access is granted per business, so being an administrator in one says nothing about your access in another; someone joining a second business must be invited to it separately. The same applies to anything connected: an agent or a website is connected to a particular business, not to your account at large.
Where this connects
The pieces inside a business are covered in the data model, access within one in how access works, and the setup steps in create your first business.