How to use parent and child companies
Overview
Tenants within IOMAD allow for users and courses to be grouped into one company, which can have its own distinct branding and settings. But a company structure might be more than a single, one-brand entity. It could have multiple, differently branded companies underneath the main umbrella and/or distinct, disparate areas of the company that should not be visible to the other company managers.
Ultimately, the use of departments won’t be able to cope with the overall structure, which is where parent/child companies come in. Parent/child company structure can also be used to facilitate reselling of your courses by a third party.
Setting up the parent/child company relationship
The best way to describe the process is with an example, so we will be dealing with a multinational hotel chain (Big Hotel Holdings) which has 4 different brands: Sumptuous Spa Hotels, Boutique Boudoirs, Corporate Client Chain, and Basic Beds-R-Us. Each has its own distinct branding and target customer, so the process is as follows:
- Create a company within the IOMAD dashboard for Big Hotel Holdings with all of the normal setups for branding, departments, users and courses.
- Create a company for each of the brands: Sumptuous Spa Hotels, Boutique Boudoirs, Corporate Client Chain and Basic Beds-R-Us.

- When creating the company, in the Advanced company settings, choose Big Hotel Holdings as the Parent company. NOTE: When you change the Parent company, the form will reload and now be titled Create child company.
Alternatively, you can go to the Manage companies page from the Company tab of the IOMAD dashboard, and use the Create child company button to automatically select the parent company.
Setting up parent/child companies for resellers
If you have a company that partners with you, selling some or all of your course catalogue to their own clients, they may want to be able to manage their activities without having to ask you to set them up. If this is the case, you can set up the reseller company as normal on the site using the IOMAD dashboard. Then:
- Create a new Moodle role called Reseller (or something similar) within the system context.
- Grant this role the following four capabilities:
- Add a child company (block/iomad_company_admin:company_add_child)
- Split a license to a child company (block/iomad_company_admin:split_my_licenses)
- Edit my company licenses (block/iomad_company_admin:edit_my_licenses)
- Suspend a company (block/iomad_company_admin:suspendcompanies)
- Allocate this role to the Reseller company manager through the Moodle site administration menus, which will then grant them the extra capabilities.
Using licenses with resellers
If you are using licenses for your courses, then you can create a license for the Reseller company in the usual manner:
- The company manager can now split this license up between the child companies they have created up to the limit of license slots you have allocated to the Reseller company.
- These child company licenses will take on the same type and date settings as the main license, and courses can only be selected from the list of courses assigned to the main license.
For more information, see Licenses and how to use them.