Create your first business

A business is the top level of everything you do in Sonta. Your data, your team, and your agents all live inside one. Creating your first is where you start — and the choices are less about setup screens than about how you want your operation organised: what it is called, the fields it works in, where it operates, and how its work is divided.

What a business is

A business is a self-contained workspace. Everything you build later — the things you track, the people who work with you, the agents that act on your behalf — belongs to one business and stays within it. Nothing crosses from one business into another. That boundary is the point: it lets Sonta hold completely separate operations side by side without mixing them.

What you set when you create one

A new business is defined by a few things: a name (what it is called, the workspace your team sees), the industries it operates in (the kind of work it does), and an address (where it is based). None of this locks you into a rigid template — it describes the business, it does not constrain what you build inside it.

Locations and departments

This is where a business becomes more than a single bucket. A business can have several locations — branches, sites, offices — and each location can hold its own departments. Departments are how records stay separated by the work they belong to. In one location, one department might handle sales, another services, another stock and inventory — and the records each one owns stay in its own space rather than piling into one shared list. A business with several branches, each with its own departments, keeps every branch's records apart from the rest. If your operation runs from more than one place, or splits cleanly into different kinds of work, set up locations and departments to match — that structure is what keeps a growing business legible instead of one undifferentiated pile of data.

Working hours and booking

Departments can each carry their own working hours. A sales desk and a service bay in the same location can keep different schedules, and each department's hours belong to it, not to the business as a whole. This matters most for booking: when something in a department can be booked, its working hours decide when slots are available — so the schedule people see reflects when that specific department is actually open, location by location.

More than one business

You are not limited to one. You can create as many businesses as you need, and they stay completely separate — different data, different teams, different agents. An agency runs one business per client; a company with two brands keeps them apart without juggling two accounts. If that is your situation, create them as separate businesses from the start rather than splitting one later.

Where to go next

To see how the pieces inside a business fit together — collections, entries, fields, and how they relate — read how Sonta AI fits together. For what each term means on its own, there is the Sonta AI glossary.