Two regulated businesses, one CRM, no crossed wires
- Organization
- Financial services organization with insurance and advisory arms
- Built with
- Zoho CRM, Client Scripts
The problem
Running two businesses in one CRM saves money and keeps shared clients in one place. But the advisory side is held to a different standard, and its client and account data can't be visible to people who aren't supposed to see it. Hiding a tab isn't enough when records can still be found through search, reports, or related lists.
What I built
- Seven profiles covering admins, standard users on each side, advisory-only users, and commissions staff, each with only the module access its role needs.
- Parallel role hierarchies, so managers on one side never inherit visibility into the other.
- Private sharing on sensitive modules, so account-level data is visible only to the people who own it.
- Layout-level boundaries that hide sensitive sections of a record from users who can see the record itself.
- A written rule against cross-division sharing, because a well-built permission structure can still be undone by one careless sharing rule.
- A permissions audit, with a report the compliance officer could review.
What changed
Both businesses work in one system, shared clients stay in one place, and the answer to "who can see this?" is the same in every layer of the CRM.