Overview
Some Nutshell customers have businesses with structures that may suggest setting up multiple accounts for each need. There are advantages and drawbacks to both approaches, and this article is here to help guide you through the decision-making process.
When we refer to Nutshell accounts in this article, we're talking about completely separate paid subscriptions, not separate users within a single account.
As a general guideline, it’s usually best for a business to use a single Nutshell account, even when there are unique business units or product lines.
Types of businesses who encounter this decision
Franchises
Sibling companies under a single parent organization
Affiliated partnerships
When a combined Nutshell account might be right for you
Roll-up reporting
If you will need to report on combined sales, leads or activity across businesses, you should use a combined Nutshell account. We do not offer reports that roll-up data from unique Nutshell accounts.
A person who needs to sync email or calendar to multiple Nutshell accounts
An email address can only be attached to one Nutshell account. If you have somebody (say a sales leader), who will be interacting with customers in multiple Nutshell accounts, they will only be able to sync their email and calendars with one account.
One person logging in to multiple Nutshell accounts
Similarly, if one person is trying to access multiple Nutshell accounts, they must have unique email addresses for each account.
Viewing lead, email or note history from other accounts
Separate Nutshell accounts cannot share information like notes or leads. If you want to see a sale or conversation from another Nutshell account, you'll need to access that account directly.
When separate Nutshell accounts might be the way to go
Businesses with no overlapping staff and customers
If you have two businesses that have no overlap of staff and of contacts (i.e. a Pennsylvania franchise and a Michigan franchise), you may prefer two separate accounts. You will be unable to report on total sales across both franchises, but you will get full isolation of data between the two Nutshell accounts.
Businesses with extreme silos between sales reps
Some businesses have competitive sales processes where two reps might be pursuing the same lead, but the business doesn’t want the reps to share any information with each other. In this case, two separate accounts would fully isolate leads, notes and contact information.
Nutshell tools that can support segmentation within a single account
In Nutshell Pro, you can use per-team view permissions to restrict what certain teams can see. For example, you could create an “East coast” team that could only view leads and contacts that are assigned to them.
Nutshell’s role-based permissions allow you to establish roles that are restricted from certain functions (like deleting a contact, or sending a marketing campaign).
Nutshell’s limited-access Marketing permissions allow you to grant limited access to email marketing features, so a user can’t view or edit campaigns created by another user.
Multiple lead pipelines and teams are useful for segmenting product lines.
Nutshell tools that can support multiple business identities within a single account
You can set up multiple email addresses per user (i.e. andy@nutshell.com and andy@webfx.com) — at the moment you can only sync one Google account, but if you have multiple email aliases, they will all show up in Nutshell.
You can configure multiple domains for our Marketing suite. You can send marketing campaigns from info@company1.com and info@company2.com from the same Nutshell account. The same is true for our Landing pages capabilities.
Capabilities that aren’t currently available
There isn’t a way to sync contacts or companies between separate Nutshell accounts. If a contact is added to one account, it won’t be automatically added to another. If this is something you need, a combined account might be the solution.
We currently don’t support syncing multiple Google or Office365 accounts to the same user account. We do expect to add support for multiple calendars in Q2 2025.
Email unsubscribe and SMS opt-out statuses are absolute for a Nutshell account. If a recipient selects “Unsubscribe me from all email” or opts out of SMS, they won’t receive further communications from that account.