PCO and agency model
ema supports three ways of working, on the same platform:
- Association (AMS-style) — a membership body runs its own events and manages members, dues, status, and CPD in one place.
- Client-direct — an organisation runs its own events directly: a corporate events team, a university, a society.
- Agency / PCO — a professional conference organiser runs events on behalf of many client organisations, moving between them from a single login.
This page explains the agency / PCO model: how your organisations and projects are arranged, how your staff work across many clients, and — most importantly — the difference between how ema bills you and how you bill your clients. If you run events for external clients, read this before you create your first project.
Your instance holds many organisations
Your ema is a private, fully isolated instance. Your data lives on its own and is never shared with any other ema customer. Inside your instance are organisations, and there are two kinds:
- Your operator organisation — your agency itself. It owns your staff, your branding defaults, your own CRM and deals, and your integrations.
- A client organisation for each customer you run events for — for example, a medical society or a trade association. Each client organisation is walled off: a client only ever sees their own data.
A project is a single event, and it belongs to the client organisation it is for — not to your agency. That project's registrations, program, exhibitors, budget, tasks, and documents all sit under that client.
A client organisation is usually created for you automatically the first time you turn a sales opportunity into a delivery project (see Project onboarding). You can also add one directly.
How your staff work across many clients
Because each project belongs to a client organisation, your agency staff are given access on top — in one of three ways, which stack:
- Tenant-wide roles — the way most agency staff get broad reach. A tenant-wide role (for example, a finance role or a support role) grants access to the relevant areas across every client organisation at once, without adding people to each client one at a time. This is how a shared "Event Ops" or "Finance" team spans all clients.
- Organisation or project assignment — for focused access, add a staff member to a single client organisation, or to one specific project. They then see only that.
- Client access — people from the client organisation itself sign in and see a read-mostly, scoped view of only their own projects.
Tenant-wide roles apply to your own staff only — they can never be given to a client organisation's people.
The full picture of roles, channels, and visibility — how ema decides who can see or do what.
Set up tenant-wide roles for staff who work across all your clients.
Two kinds of billing — keep them separate
This is the single most common point of confusion, so be clear which one you mean:
| Question | Which system |
|---|---|
| "How much does ema cost my agency?" | Your ema subscription |
| "How do I charge my client for their event?" | The project's posting configuration in Financials |
1. Your ema subscription — how ema bills your agency
ema bills your agency with a single subscription for your whole instance. It does not matter how many client organisations or projects you run — you are billed once, as one account, on your plan. Your clients never see this; it is between your agency and ema.
2. Posting configuration — how you charge your clients
Each project answers two questions that together determine how money for that event is treated and how you earn from it. You set them when the project is created, and they reflect your commercial relationship with that client.
- Revenue basis — Gross (principal) means your agency sells directly and recognises the event's revenue as your own; choose this when you contract with attendees and exhibitors in your own name. Net (agent) means you act as agent for the client: the event's income and costs pass through to the client, and your agency earns a management fee on top.
- Client money custody — where money collected on the client's behalf is held: No client money held, Held in the operating account (a clearing liability against your own cash), or Held in trust, in a segregated account owned by the same or a separate legal entity. Choose a trust option when your engagement or local rules require trust handling of client funds.
The older principal / agency / agency (trust) vocabulary still appears as presets on the sales side — an opportunity records its intended billing mode, which maps onto these two dimensions when it converts to a project.
In agent configurations you can set the management fee as a percentage of event expenses or as a per-delegate rate, and choose whether it applies to client-funded spend as well as your own. You can also control how much of the project's budget the client sees, from a fully transparent view down to a limited one.
Revenue basis and client money custody drive revenue recognition, trust handling, and how your management fee is calculated — they are commercial decisions, not display settings. Agree them with the client before the project starts.
A project's revenue basis and client money custody can be changed only until the first financial activity exists on it (a deal, order, invoice, journal entry, event funding record, bill, purchase order, or expense claim) — and even before that, changes go through a change request that a second person must approve. After the first financial activity they are locked, to keep the financial record consistent. Confirm the configuration before you begin any financial work on the project.
How orders, invoices, payments, and the general ledger work once the posting configuration is set.
What your client sees
A client organisation's people sign in to the same app your team uses, but scoped tightly to their own world:
- Only the projects that belong to their organisation.
- A read-mostly view — schedules, documents, and budgets (to the level of visibility you allow), plus any approvals you send them.
- None of your agency's internal data: your other clients, your CRM and deals, your internal costs and margins, or your own labour and expenses.
Your agency wins the annual congress for the Heart Surgery Society. Converting the won opportunity creates a client organisation for the Society and a project under it, set to a Net (agent) revenue basis with a per-delegate management fee. Your event-ops team already has a tenant-wide role, so the project appears for them immediately. The Society's contact signs in and sees only their congress — the schedule, the agreed budget, and the approvals you send — while your internal margins stay private.
How a project goes from a won opportunity to a configured, ready-to-run event.
Journey pages need an operator sign-in to open.
- Client funds to close-outFinancial ops
Money held in trust for a client is drawn down, reconciled against the bank, and closed out without a stray balance.
- Step 1 of 5Set the project to Agency (trust) billing before money movesFinancial controller