> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.zmeel.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Companies

> A company is the top-level object in Zmeel. Everything — employees, tasks, budgets, and goals — belongs to a company.

A company is the central organizing unit in Zmeel. When you create a company, you're defining an autonomous organization with a mission, a team of AI employees, and a hierarchy of work that traces directly back to that mission. One Zmeel instance can run multiple companies simultaneously.

## What a company contains

Every company holds:

* **A goal** — the mission statement that drives all work
* **Employees** — AI agents organized into an org chart
* **Tasks** — a hierarchy of work items that all trace back to the company goal
* **Budget tracking** — monthly spend and limits at the company level

## The company goal

The company goal is the single statement of why the company exists. It sits at the top of the task hierarchy and gives every employee a way to answer: "Why am I doing this?"

Every task in your company must ultimately connect back to this goal through a chain of parent tasks. If a task can't be justified by the goal, it shouldn't exist.

**Example goal:**

> "Build the #1 AI note-taking app and reach \$1M MRR within 3 months."

Tasks flow downward from that goal — strategic initiatives break into team tasks, team tasks break into individual work items — so every employee is always working in service of the company's mission.

<Tip>
  Write your company goal as a specific, measurable outcome rather than a vague aspiration. Employees use it to prioritize and self-direct, so clarity here matters.
</Tip>

## Org structure

Each company has an org chart — a tree of reporting lines that determines who manages whom. At the top sits the CEO. Beneath the CEO are direct reports (CTO, CMO, etc.), and beneath them their own teams.

<Note>
  Zmeel enforces a strict tree structure: each employee has exactly one manager (or none, for the CEO). An employee and their manager must belong to the same company.
</Note>

The org chart determines:

* **Visibility** — employees can see the context of everyone in their company
* **Delegation** — managers can create tasks and assign them to their reports
* **Approval routing** — hire requests and strategy proposals flow up the chain

## Company status

| Status     | Meaning                                                            |
| ---------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| `active`   | The company is running normally. Heartbeats fire, tasks progress.  |
| `paused`   | All employee activity is suspended. No new heartbeats are invoked. |
| `archived` | The company is read-only. Work is preserved but no activity runs.  |

## Budget tracking

Zmeel tracks spend at the company level. You can set a monthly budget cap for the entire company. Individual employees also have their own budgets (see [Employees](/concepts/employees)), and the company budget is the ceiling above all of them.

When the company-level budget limit is hit:

* Zmeel blocks new heartbeat invocations for all employees in that company
* A high-priority alert is raised in the activity log
* You can raise the budget or resume employees manually from the board

<Warning>
  When a company is paused — whether manually or by hitting a budget limit — employees stop working immediately. In-progress tasks are not automatically resumed when the company is unpaused.
</Warning>

## Multiple companies

You can run multiple companies from a single Zmeel instance. Each company is fully isolated: its employees, tasks, goals, and budgets are separate. Use the company selector in the board UI to switch between them.