These three switches decide whether your documents carry an organisational address.
- Track branches. Documents ask which branch they belong to, and reports such as the Profit & Loss can be filtered by branch. Each user has a home branch, used as the default on documents they raise. Turn it on when the business operates from more than one location and the owners ask "how did the other branch do?"
- Track departments. Documents carry a department (Sales, Operations, Administration, and your own), and financial reports can be read per department. Turn it on when you manage cost centres and want department heads to see their own numbers.
- Structure: departments under branches. Only offered while departments are tracked. Your departments can each sit under a branch — the hierarchy is company, then branch, then department — and this switch makes the screens honour it: the Budget Grid groups its department tabs under branch headings with a subtotal for each branch, Budget vs Actual can be filtered and grouped by branch, the department pickers on documents and reports group their choices by branch, and the BI reporting rolls departments up to their branch. A department's branch stays optional: one with no branch is a company-level department and sits under a No branch heading. Nothing about your figures changes — the branch subtotals are always worked out from the department figures, never typed.
- Track sales reps. Sales orders and invoices record the sales rep responsible, feeding rep-by-rep performance reporting. The rep is recorded on the documents for reporting; it does not change the accounting entries.
- Territory links. Each node of your sales territory tree — the sales organisation, a region, a single territory — can also name the branch and the department it belongs to, on the territory's own record (System Setup → Sales Territories). Both links are optional, and a node that names neither inherits the nearest parent that does: link a region once and every territory beneath it follows. The links change no figures and no documents; they give your reporting the bridge — sales revenue in the BI reports can be read by territory and rolled up to that territory's department and branch. Budgets are unaffected: they are still kept by department, exactly as before.
With all three off, documents carry none of these fields — one less question on every form. That is the right answer for a small, single-site business, and nothing is lost by waiting: switching one on later starts the tracking from that day forward.