Location Hierarchy, Ownership Groups & Service Areas – User Guide

What's New

Your organization can now manage locations, ownership, and territories in a much more scalable and structured way. These tools give you clearer reporting, better inheritance of workflows, and a cleaner way to manage multi-location owners and territory-based structures.

 

📍 Location Groups

Location Groups sit above individual locations and act as a flexible container for:

• Markets

• Regions

• Brands

• Development groups

When you apply workflows, documents, or assignments to a Location Group, all child locations automatically inherit them.

Ownership Groups

Ownership Groups formally represent the legal entities that own one or more franchise locations.
They allow you to:

• Centralize ownership documentation

• Manage rights and access at the entity level

• Reduce repetitive per-location ownership assignments

When you associate an Ownership Group with a Location Group, all child locations inherit that ownership relationship by default.

Service Area Tagging

A flexible, territory-based segmentation framework separate from ZIP codes.
You can enable it per brand to define:

• Territories

• Delivery areas

• Market boundaries

This gives you another layer of reporting and grouping without depending on traditional postal data.

How This Impacts Your Organization

For Corporate Admins

You now have a much cleaner way to manage ownership and location structure.
Instead of attaching owners to each location individually, you can:

• Assign ownership once at the entity level

• Let it cascade to every related location

• Override inheritance when needed

This greatly simplifies management as your system grows.

For Franchise Ops, Field Consultants, and Regional Leaders

You gain richer reporting views, because training, compliance, and launch metrics can now roll up to:

• Location Groups

• Ownership Groups

• Service Areas

This is especially powerful for:

• Multi-brand operators

• Large ownership groups

• Regions with complex organizational boundaries

For Location-Level Users

Nothing changes about how they work day-to-day.
But they benefit from:

• Cleaner data

• Consistent permissions

• Clearer inheritance from corporate workflows

What You Need to Do to Prepare

Step 1: Review Your Current Structure

Decide whether your brand would benefit from:

• Location Groups

• Ownership Groups

• Service Areas

• Or all three

For many brands, the most impactful change will be moving from per-location owners to Ownership Groups.

Step 2: Define Your Entities

If using Ownership Groups:

• Identify legal entities

• Map which locations each entity owns

• Prepare documentation if needed

If using Location Groups:

• Identify your organizational structure (markets, regions, etc.)

If enabling Service Areas:

• Prepare an official list of territories

• Confirm which locations belong to each service area

Step 3: Audit your current Delightree data

If you currently assign owners at the location level, you may choose to migrate them into Ownership Groups using the one-time migration flow.

Review:

• Existing location list

• Current “owners” attached per location

• Any naming inconsistencies

• Locations missing required metadata

Step 4: Train Internal Teams

Any team managing:

• Ownership

• Territory assignments

• Region-based workflows

• Group-level reporting

…should receive training on how the new hierarchy works.

How This Affects Your Existing Workflows

If You Don’t Create Groups

Nothing changes.
Your system behaves exactly as it does today.

If You Create Location Groups

• Assignments made at the group level roll down automatically to all child locations

• You can still override data at the individual location if needed

• Reporting gains a new hierarchy level without affecting historical data

If You Use Ownership Groups

• Ownership no longer needs to be repeated for each location

• Access rights derive from Ownership Groups

• Data becomes cleaner and easier to manage long-term

If You Enable Service Areas

• Locations gain an additional segmentation tag

• Reporting can be filtered by territory

• No other workflows change automatically