Setting up an organization/project

Most programme systems, regardless of vendor, separate two levels of structure: the institution running programmes, and the individual programmes themselves. Getting this separation right before any data entry begins saves a great deal of rework later, because reporting, permissions and data ownership are usually built around it.

The institutional level typically holds things that are true across every programme it runs: its name, the countries it legally or operationally works in, and the staff accounts that need access to more than one programme at a time. The programme level holds what is specific to one piece of funded work: its own timeline, its own measurement plan, and its own delivery model.

A common early mistake is modelling a new phase of the same programme, or a lightly different funding stream, as a brand-new top-level tenant rather than a new project underneath the same institution. That fragments historical data and forces staff to hold multiple logins for what is really one organization's work.

An organization is the top-level tenant in METRA GET — every project, user, indicator and record lives inside exactly one. A project then defines its own countries, its own reporting period conventions, and whether delivery runs Direct or through Implementing Partners.

Users are added with a role (administrator, programme officer, field officer, and others) that determines what they can see and change — never a shared login across a team.