Location Hierarchy, Ownership Groups & Service Areas

What's New

🗂️ Locations — Redesigned Navigation

The Locations section has been redesigned with cleaner information architecture and improved navigation. Everything is in the same place — it's just faster to find.

If you manage hundreds of locations, you'll notice the difference immediately: less clicking, cleaner layout, easier to get to what you need.

No setup required. The new experience is on by default.

📍 Location Groups

Location Groups sit above individual locations and act as a flexible container for markets, regions, brands, and development groups.

🆕 Location Groups are now fully operational units — not just organizational labels.

Previously, Location Groups were structural containers. Assignments had to be made location by location or through Ownership Groups. That changes with this release.

What Location Groups can now do:

Group-level assignment — tasks, Training Paths, knowledge base content, and announcements can be targeted directly at a Location Group. Every member location receives the assignment automatically.
Group-level reporting — completion and compliance data can be viewed and filtered at the group level, giving regional leaders a clean rollup without exporting individual location reports.

What hasn't changed:

Existing Location Group configurations are unaffected until an admin explicitly elevates a group to an operational unit. Nothing changes automatically.

⚡ Assigning to Groups — How It Works

The assignment workflow now supports both Location Groups and Ownership Groups as direct targets across tasks, Training Paths, and content assignments.

Select a group as your assignment target and the assignment propagates to every member location in that group automatically — whether it has 5 locations or 500.

Both group types are supported:

Location Groups — assign by market, region, brand, or cluster structure
Ownership Groups — assign by legal entity, so ownership-based rollouts are as simple as regional ones

No configuration required. Location Groups and Ownership Groups already set up in your system are immediately available as assignment targets after release.

Existing assignment behavior is unchanged. Individual location selection and "all locations" both continue to work exactly as before. Group-based assignment is additive — no existing Zaps, integrations, or scheduled assignments are affected.

For large rollouts, always check whether a group assignment covers what you need before selecting locations individually. A single group selection replaces dozens or hundreds of manual picks.

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.

For large networks, this is the biggest day-to-day time saver yet. What used to require selecting locations one by one now takes a single action regardless of network size.

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. This is enabled by your Customer Success team so reach out if you'd like to start using this today!

🌍 International Location Support

Location profiles now support non-US address formats. Brands with locations outside the United States can enter country-appropriate address information directly in the platform.

What this means for your network:

International locations can now be accurately represented in Delightree
Address fields adapt to the country selected
SMS support for international locations is coming in a future release

👉 If your network includes locations outside the US, you can now add them with correct address data. No workarounds needed.

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.

If using Location Groups: also decide which groups should be elevated to operational units. Not every group needs to be — start with the regional or cluster structures where delegated oversight makes the most sense.

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.

Step 5: Check International Locations (if applicable)

If your brand has locations outside the US:

Review any existing international location profiles
Update address information to use the correct country format
Note that SMS for international locations is not yet available — this is coming in a future release

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 member locations
You can still override data at the individual location level if needed
Reporting gains a new hierarchy level without affecting historical data
🆕 Tasks, training, and content can be assigned to the group directly — no more selecting locations individually

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

Location Hierarchy, Ownership Groups & Service Areas – User Guide

This guide covers how to manage complex franchise networks in Delightree — including Location Groups, Ownership Groups, Service Area Tagging, and the latest updates to how locations are structured and assigned.