Organizations Overview

Why use the Organization Feature?

Using the Organizations features has many benefits, and can enable many things for your project.

• Group Users into Teams – Organizations let you group users based on teams, locations, or partners.

• Share Cases Within Teams – Team members can register, view, and update the same cases, making collaboration within their teams easier.

• Track Progress by Team – Reports can be filtered by organization to monitor team performance, which helps both worker’s supervisors, and data analysts.

• Control Who Sees What – Users in one organization can be restricted from viewing data from another. (This works for both mobile users who enter data, and web users who view the data).

Who Should Use the Organization Feature?

• Projects with multiple teams or partners (e.g., a consortium of NGOs or government health departments-- e.g. clinics working with community health workers / NGOs).

• Organizations with strict data privacy needs, ensuring data access is restricted appropriately.

• Projects that require tiered reporting and oversight, such as supervisors managing field teams.

By structuring your CommCare project using Organizations, you can simplify user management, data access, and reporting while ensuring a smooth workflow for your teams.

How does the Organization Feature Work?

By default, when a mobile worker creates a case, only they can see and update it.

A Case Sharing Group lets a team—like health workers or supervisors—work on the same cases together, even if they didn’t create them.

The Organization Feature goes even further by organizing cases into different levels, like country, state, district, village, and clinics. Cases are assigned to these locations instead of just one person. Users are linked to locations, so they can access cases based on where they work.

This makes case management easier and helps teams share and update cases smoothly across different areas.

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Key features of Organization Structure

1. Location Case Ownership – Instead of giving one user control over a case, cases belong to locations (like a clinic or district). Anyone in that location can see and update them.

2. Access Based on Location – Higher-level locations (like a district) can see and manage cases from all the locations under them in the hierarchy (like clinics).

3. Flexible Case Sharing – You can choose how cases are shared. A health worker might only see their own cases, while a clinic team can work together on all cases.

4. Custom Location Information – You can set custom information for each location, like what supplies are available at each location, to match your project’s needs. These custom fields can be referenced in the application.

In short, the Organization Feature helps you organize teams, share cases easily, and control who has access to the data on mobile and on the back end—perfect for managing big projects with many teams or locations.

Difference between Case Sharing and Organization Structure

If you are familiar with case sharing, you might have used Case Sharing Groups before to enable similar sort of workflows. This table summarizes the key differences, helping to clarify when to use Case Sharing Groups versus the Organization Structure and Location feature in CommCare.

Using Organizations in Your Application

In order to use the Organizations feature for your application, there are two main things you need to do: 

1. Set up the Organizational Structure: In your project space, you’ll need to set up the level of your organizational structure, and then add individual locations. Instructions can be found here - Setting Up Organization Levels & Structure

2. Assign Cases to Organizations in Your Application: In any form that registers cases, you’ll need to tell to tell the application that organizations are going to own cases-- not users. There are several ways to do that, all outlined here Managing Case Sharing & Data Access in Organizations | Setting Case Ownership using Locations