Organizations
An Organization (Organization) is a company or agency Erde tracks: a laboratory, consultant, contractor, regulator, or client. Each Organization is classified by an Organization Type and holds the address and contact details you reference elsewhere in the product. An Organization owns its Contacts, and one can be designated a Laboratory.
Organizations are an installation-wide catalog: a single record is referenced from many places and is not scoped to any one Site or Project. You manage them at Data Management → Directory → Organizations (/data-management/organizations).
What an Organization holds
Every Organization carries a Name and an Organization Type, and is marked active or inactive. The rest of its fields — address, phone, email, website, and a free-text description — are optional.
The Name must be unique across all Organizations. This differs from the code-keyed reference data elsewhere in Erde, where the Code carries uniqueness and the name is descriptive; an Organization has no code and is identified by its name.
Country is stored as a two-letter ISO code (for example US, DE), and any ISO country is accepted. State is stored as a subdivision code for the countries Erde keeps a list for — the US, Canada, and Mexico — so picking California stores CA. For any other country, State is free text, so an international region such as Bavaria is saved as typed. The address is reference detail (it appears on contact cards and reports); only the coordinates on a Site are validated as real-world locations.
| Field | Type | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Name | text | Yes | Display name; unique across Organizations (max 200 characters) |
| Organization Type | reference | Yes | The Organization Type this record is classified as; must be active |
| Active | yes/no | Yes | Whether the Organization is in active use; defaults to Yes |
| Address Line 1 | text | No | Street address |
| Address Line 2 | text | No | Suite, unit, or additional address line |
| City | text | No | City |
| State | text | No | Subdivision code for the US, Canada, or Mexico; free-text region for other countries |
| Postal Code | text | No | Postal or ZIP code |
| Country | code | No | Two-letter ISO country code; any country is accepted |
| Phone | text | No | Validated as a phone number |
| text | No | Validated as an email address | |
| Website | text | No | Validated as a website; the scheme is optional and the value is stored exactly as entered |
| Description | text | No | Free-text notes (max 2000 characters) |
The Organizations list shows Name, Type, City, State, and Phone, with an Inactive marker on records that are no longer active.
Organization types
An Organization Type is reference data: a curated list of a Name and an optional code, not a fixed set baked into the product. Data Stewards add and edit the available types in the Reference Data area, so the list grows as you onboard new kinds of organization.
Erde can seed a starter set you can keep, edit, or remove — for example Laboratory, Consultant, Contractor, Driller, and Regulatory Agency. When you create or edit an Organization, you select from the active types; an inactive type cannot be assigned to a new record.
Contacts and laboratories
An Organization owns its records of related people and lab capability. The detail page presents these on three tabs — Details, Laboratory, and Contacts.
Figure: An Organization owns its Contacts, and may also be designated a Laboratory.
- Contacts — the people at the Organization. The Organization owns these records; manage them on the Contacts tab. See Contacts.
- Laboratory — designate an Organization as a Laboratory so it can be assigned to a Chain of Custody or a Lab Report. On the Laboratory tab, select Create Laboratory, or Go to Laboratory Details when one already exists. See Laboratories.
Permissions
Any internal user can view Organizations. Creating, editing, and deleting them is restricted to the Administrator, Data Manager, and Manager roles; the internal Staff role has read-only access.
| Action | Administrator | Data Manager | Manager | Staff |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Organizations | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Create, edit, delete | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Designate as Laboratory | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
Deleting an Organization
You can delete an Organization only when nothing references it. Because its foreign keys use a restrict rule, Erde blocks the delete while the Organization still has Contacts, is designated a Laboratory, or is referenced by other records — such as a Location's owner, a Well or Borehole driller, or a Data Management Plan. Remove or repoint those references first, then delete the Organization.
Deleting an Organization cannot be undone. Mark an Organization Inactive instead when you want to retire it but keep its history.