Can multiple branches of a letting agency share one Certaby account, or do we need separate accounts per branch?

One Certaby account works across multiple branches of a letting agency. Each branch staffer is added as a seat on the operator team; checks are firm-scoped not branch-scoped; the audit-cert PDF identifies which branch ran the check by the operator's email recorded on the cert. A separate account per branch is only necessary when a franchise model needs branch-level billing separation.

The practical setup for a multi-branch firm:

1. Head office creates the main Certaby account and acts as the billing owner. Credit-pack purchases (£20 / £50 / £100 / £500 packs at certaby.com/pricing) sit in a shared credit balance.

2. Each branch manager or compliance officer is invited as an operator seat. Operator-tier accounts can run checks but cannot manage billing or invite other seats; admin-tier accounts can.

3. Every check carries the operator email of the staff member who ran it. The audit-cert PDF records this in the footer plus on the verify URL projection so the trail is operator-attributable, not just firm-attributable.

4. The shared credit pool means a busy branch can draw down faster than a quiet branch; head office monitors total spend from the main dashboard without needing per-branch billing.

When a separate account per branch makes more sense:

1. Franchise structures where each branch is a separate legal entity with its own MLRO and its own HMRC AML supervision registration. In that case each franchise is structurally a separate firm under MLR-2017 reg 21 and should have its own records.

2. Independent partner firms operating under a shared brand. Same reasoning: separate legal entities, separate MLRO appointments, separate records.

3. Where head office wants per-branch P&L visibility without aggregating from check-volume reports.

MLR-2017 itself is agnostic between firm-level and branch-level record-keeping for branches inside a single legal entity. What it requires is that the records exist, are retained for 5 years post-relationship-end (reg 40), and are accessible to HMRC at inspection. A single Certaby account with operator-attribution on every cert satisfies all three for branches operating under one firm.

For a firm running 3 branches doing 15 lets a month combined: one Certaby account at PAYG £4.95 per check costs about £225 a month total, all funded from a head-office credit pool. Each branch sees only its own dashboard view of recent checks; head office sees the aggregate. Compared to running 3 separate SmartSearch contracts at £700/month each (£2,100/month total), the multi-branch consolidation saves roughly £1,875/month while keeping per-branch audit-trail attribution intact.

Last updated 2026-05-19.