New entity creation
Your LittleBig Connection Company account can be subdivided into different entities. These entities are used to reflect the internal organization of your company: each entity can have independent settings and management, and be itself subdivided into sub-entities. For a general presentation of entities, please read this article. As a Company Administrator, you can create and modify the entities of the account. Let's see in this article the steps to create an entity.
Within this article
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Overall video
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Create an entity in LittleBig Connection
To create an entity, simply follow these steps:
- Go to the Entities tab, and click on Manage Entities
- Click on Add entity, or open the action menu
of the entity to which you want to attach a sub-entity, and click on Add a sub-entity
- Choose the type of entity you want to create: legal or organizational
- You are then redirected to the entity creation form, where you can start by filling in the General settings
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General settings
The general settings are divided into 5 sections for legal entities and 4 sections for organizational entities.
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General information
- Name of the entity and parent entity : indicate the name of your entity and check the parent entity, because some settings can be retrieved from it, and its Manager/Deputy will have visibility on the objects of your entity.
Good to know
- To facilitate the identification of your entity, you can also add a photo by clicking on the
icon near the image, at the top of the form.
- Company or Entity administrators may add more than one email address for people to be notified by email when a proposal is selected for an RFP issued on the entity.
- Description: the entity's description indicated here will also be automatically proposed to you during the creation of a Request for Proposal (RFP), in the Project's Context field
- Address (mandatory for legal entities only)
- Region: the region of an organizational entity must correspond to the region of its parent entity. A region on the platform represents a country or a state of a country on which particular rules apply
- Company identification number (corresponds to SIRET in France): mandatory for legal entities only
- Unique Identification key: applicable only if you have activated the Interfacing premium feature
When the information is complete, click Save and Continue at the bottom of your screen to proceed to the next section.
Important
If you have the Purchase Request option Activated, you will also see information about the status, ID and external ID.
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Billing contact information (only for legal entities)
- Professional taxes: this data depends on the region of the entity. In Europe, it will be the intra-community VAT number
- Invoicing information: this data will allow you to adapt the edition of the invoices
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Entity collaborators
Here you can add an Entity Administrator who will be able to view and modify the settings of the entities (including sub-entities) they are assigned to.
Good to know
Assigning an Entity Administrator to an entity isn't mandatory. If you don't need to add this level of entity management, you can leave the field empty.
Then, you need to select the Entity Lead and the Deputy manager of the entity. They will both have the possibility to create and see the RFPs and projects on all the sub-entities of the entity.
In addition, if the entity is selected as a validation step on a validation workflow, the Entity Lead will be asked to validate the publication of RFPs using this workflow. In case of absence, the Deputy manager will be able to do it for him.
Managers are the users who can create and view all the RFPs and projects of the entity and its sub-entities, whereas the Operational can only do this for the entity and not its sub-entities.
Good to know
To know more about the roles at the entity level, please read this article.
It is possible to affiliate an employee to an entity from this tab, or when creating their access via Colleagues in the Company tab.
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Spending lines and workflows
The spending line(s) associated with your entity allow you to define which validation steps you want to put in place for the creation of your Purchase Orders, and which budgets will be impacted.
Important
It is mandatory to have at least one active spending line linked to your entity so that colleagues can create a Request for Proposal on it.
The Manager and Deputy manager of the spending line (defined directly in the settings of the spending line) are Buyers, who can be selected during the creation of the RFPs as validators of the selected proposal and creators of the Purchase Order, beyond a certain amount.
Each spending line can be linked to one or more validation workflows, which determine the validation steps necessary for the publication of a Request for Proposal.
When a workflow is associated with a spending line, this means that, when creating an RFP on the entity, after selecting the spending line (defining the validation of the PO), the operational will be able to select the workflow (defining the validation of the RFP) associated with it.
Good to know
If the spending line or workflow you want to use has not yet been created, you can click on Later at the bottom of the section to continue and save your entity creation without this setting.
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Request for Proposals settings
There are three main sub-sections in this area, Mandatory clauses for applicant suppliers, project locations and notification settings.
Mandatory clauses are designed to help clients to ensure proposal submissions meet your internal processes and specification. Once set up at the entity level they become an integral part of the RFP and proposals process, meaning suppliers must accept them in order to send their proposals to your time & materials (T&M) RFP. Their goal is to help you save time, reinforce compliance and enhance the overall proposal management workflow for you and your teams. For more information on how to configure a mandatory clause please have a look at the article Configure mandatory clauses within an Entity.
Project locations, can be selected by the operational to define the location of the project (excluding possible travel) when creating the RFP and will become visible in the RFP creation form section.
If no location is entered, the field to be filled in by the operational at this level will be empty.
The Notifications section centers around the notifications sent and received at the time a proposal is selected, you may activate the toggle button and add the relevant email address(es) in the field below
When all the information is filled in, you can click on Save at the bottom right of your screen to create your new entity or save the changes. You can then go to the Specific Settings tab, to continue the configuration of the entity.
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Specific settings
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Preferred suppliers
You can check here the preferred suppliers lists that have been associated to your entity. These lists are set up at the Company level, i.e. in the Specific settings of the parent entity, to know more, please read this article.
When a new entity has been added to your account, remember to edit the necessary lists of preferred suppliers, to add this new entity to the affected ones.
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Profile code
Profile codes are a Premium feature which allows you to define and standardize the types of profiles generally sought on your RFPs, in order to consolidate your pricing and your reporting.
From this section, you can easily create, edit or delete profile codes that can be associated with RFPs or Purchase Orders on your entity.
It is also possible to retrieve one or more profile codes that have already been defined on a parent entity.
Important
If you want to use on this entity one or more rate cards configured on a parent entity, start by going to the next Rate cards tab.
Indeed, retrieving a rate card generate the automatic retrieving of the corresponding profile codes, but is no longer possible if these profile codes have already been retrieved.
Once profile codes are associated with your entity, the corresponding field must be filled in when creating any RFP or PO on the entity.
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Rate cards
Rate cards are a Premium feature as well and allow you to associate certain profile codes with specific rates, while being linked to one or more of your preferred suppliers.
Good to know
The association of your rate cards with your preferred suppliers is done at the parent entity level, in the Preferred suppliers section from the Specific settings tab.
From this tab, you can easily create, edit or delete rate cards, which can help determine the maximum expected budget on each of your RFPs. Indeed, if a rate card has been assigned to the entity, then on each RFP from your entity, the maximum budget field will be automatically filled in after the Operational selected a profile code.
Good to know
This maximum expected budget is for information purposes only, and is not visible by default on your Request for Proposal. It will nevertheless be used to qualify the proposals received, since a color code will be applied according to the supplier and the proposed rate.
It is also possible to retrieve one or more rate cards that have already been defined on a parent entity.
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Interfacing
The interfacing is also a Premium feature. If interfacing functionalities have been set up at the Company level, you will then be able to activate here the Purchase Requests/Service Receptions on your entity.
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Activity Report
In this section, you have the possibility to activate the external filling of the Activity Report for your Consultants. If you activate this option, the consultants will not be involved in the process of the Activity Report on the platform, they will only be able to view them.
Good to know
If you have enabled the Custom Fields premium feature, you can then go to the parent entity settings to edit the necessary fields and add this new entity.