Site Ownership
Site ownership answers one question per site: which company manages this site and its hardware, as between the alarm company and the end user? It is a relationship between the site and the control rooms connected to it — separate from, and independent of, the CleverCam ↔ company hardware relationship (Owned vs Rental) shown on the Hubs page.
Ownership does not yet restrict what a control room or app user can edit. Badges, columns, the approval queue and ownership offers are display and bookkeeping only; the edit lockdown will be switched on platform-wide at a later stage, after every site's ownership has settled and the escape hatches (installation mode, technician access windows) are live.
Two rules are live now and do not wait for that switch, because they decide whether a site can be self-managed at all rather than who may edit it: only CleverCam hardware can stay self-managed, and hubs are claimed and billed automatically when linked to a site.
The three states
Every site is in exactly one of these states, determined by its control-room connections:
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Primary link held by a company | That company's CCU/site — it manages the site's identity (name, address, images), structure (hubs, cameras, panels), and approves other companies' link requests. At most one primary per site. |
| Secondary link | An additional control room receiving the site's events (for example an estate's control room alongside the installing company). A secondary edits only its own connection settings — reference, notes, monitoring policy — never the shared site details. |
| Self-managed (no primary link) | A direct-to-consumer site: the end user manages everything from the CleverAlert app. Any connected control rooms are event feeds. |
Only CleverCam hardware can stay self-managed
A site may be self-managed only for as long as every hub on it is CleverCam's own CCU hardware — a CCU 8, CCU Pro or CCU 4. The moment any other hub is added, the site and all its hardware become fully managed by a security company.
"Any other hub" means everything that is not a CleverCam CCU, including:
- every alarm-panel communicator — Olarm, HYYP, Ajax, FSK, RDC, FOX, FinMon, SpotBot, Onyyx, Hikvision AX PRO, Videofied, AVLytics, Checkmate;
- third-party hubs that behave like a CCU, such as the DSC IQ;
- CleverMail virtual CCUs and the Panic App, which are monitoring products a company sells rather than hardware a client owns.
This is enforced by the platform, not by convention:
- Adding an external hub to a self-managed site immediately makes it company-managed. The company that claims the hub becomes the primary — or, if another company already holds an approved link to the site, that company does. CleverOps confirms this with "<Site> is now a company-managed site" instead of asking whether you want it.
- Releasing the primary is refused while any external hub is installed. The refusal names the hardware that is blocking it. Remove or transfer those hubs first, or offer the site to another company rather than releasing it.
- Adding a CleverCam CCU changes nothing: the site stays self-managed and you are still asked Make this your site?
Sites with no connected company at all — a CleverCam CCU bought direct by a homeowner — are unaffected. They stay self-managed and are not billed to any control room, because no control room monitors them.
How hubs are claimed and billed
Linking a hub to a site claims and bills it automatically. There is no separate step:
- The hub is claimed by the site's primary company. If the site has no primary, the sole company holding an approved link is used instead. When neither can be determined — no approved links, or two companies with equal claim — the hub is left unclaimed and the platform does not guess.
- A billing account is opened for the claiming company at the same time, so the hub appears on the billing breakdown from the moment it is deployed. Hubs flagged faulty are claimed but not billed.
- A hub already on the Rental package stays on it. Deploying a rental to a site never converts it to Owned.
A hub that is linked to a site is always shown as claimed. Unlinked hubs — spares, and panel records auto-created from inbound alarm signals — are untouched by this and stay out of your fleet count.
How sites get a primary:
- Create Site — the control room that creates a site automatically becomes its primary.
- Adding an external hub — the site becomes company-managed automatically; see above.
- Claiming and linking a CleverCam CCU — when linking a CCU your control room claims to a site that has no primary, CleverOps offers Make this your site? — accept to become the primary; decline and the site stays self-managed.
- Claim primary — on a self-managed site, claim the primary role directly from the site details header; see Managing ownership on a site.
- Accepting an ownership offer — see Ownership offers below.
- Backfill — existing sites were assigned primaries from their hub-claim and connection history when the model launched.
Where ownership is visible
- Site details header — the ownership badge next to the site name: Primary, Managed by <company>, or Self-managed.
- Hubs page — the Client column and its filter show the relationship per hub: Company site / Client's own / Managed by <company>. See Hub Management.
Managing ownership on a site
Ownership controls sit in two places on a site, split by how often you need them:
- The site header — directly under the site name and ownership badge, an ownership row appears only when there is something to action: a site nobody manages that you can claim, an offer addressed to your control room, or an offer already in flight.
- Details → Site ownership — a card at the bottom of the Details tab, just above the danger zone, holding the hand-over actions for a site your control room already runs. Giving a site away is rare and deliberate, so it lives with the other rare, deliberate actions rather than in the header.
Self-managed site — Claim primary
If the site is self-managed and your control room holds an approved connection, a Claim primary button appears. Confirming makes your control room the site's primary company. The confirmation dialog spells out what the primary role will mean once enforcement is switched on platform-wide — managing the site's identity (name, address, images) and structure (hubs, cameras, panels), and approving other companies' link requests. Until that switch is flipped, claiming only records the relationship; nothing is restricted.
Your control room is primary — Release or Offer
These two live on Details → Site ownership, not in the header. Open the site, go to the Details tab and scroll to the Site ownership card above the danger zone.
- Release primary — give the primary role up. The site becomes self-managed: no company holds the primary link and the end user keeps full control from the app. This is refused outright while the site has any non-CleverCam hardware installed — see Only CleverCam hardware can stay self-managed. If other companies hold approved links to the site, the release may also be refused until those links are handled.
- Offer to another company — pick one of the site's other connected companies and send it an ownership offer instead of forcing a transfer. Your control room stays primary until the offer is accepted, and you can cancel the offer while it is pending. The offer appears in the receiving company's ownership queue and in their site header.
An offer is addressed to your control room — Accept
When the primary role has been offered to your control room, the offer appears as a line in the ownership row with an Accept primary button — the same action as Accept ownership in the Sites-page queue, for when you are already looking at the site.
Pending offers and cancelling
Any outstanding ownership offer on the site is shown as an info line in the ownership row — who it is offered to, who made it, and when. The company that placed the offer (and CleverCam support) gets a Cancel offer action to withdraw it. An offer made before the site's ownership last changed is marked stale and can no longer be accepted.
All ownership actions require a control-room team role — technician accounts cannot claim, release, offer, or accept the primary role. While enforcement is off, every one of them is bookkeeping only.
Approval queue
At the top of the Sites page, a Site ownership queue card appears whenever there is something for your control room to action. It is hidden entirely when empty, and when populated it loads collapsed to a single summary row (for example 2 link requests · 1 ownership offer) so the page stays uncluttered — click the row to expand the items. It lists two kinds of items:
Link requests on your sites
When another company requests a connection to a site where your control room is primary, the pending request appears here with the requesting company's name, the site, and the request note. This includes auto-created requests: when a company-claimed hub is linked to a site invisible to that company, the platform creates a pending request on the company's behalf (marked Auto-created).
- Approve — the requesting company's connection becomes active (a secondary link) and the site appears in their connected sites.
- Decline — the pending request is removed. (The requesting company can ask again later.)
Only the primary company sees and actions these requests. Approving or declining requires a control-room team role — technician accounts cannot action the queue.
Ownership offers
A site's current primary (or CleverCam support, for self-managed sites) can offer the primary role to another company instead of forcing a transfer. The offer appears in the receiving company's queue as Ownership offered, naming the offering company.
- Accept ownership — your control room becomes the site's primary; the previous primary (if any) becomes a secondary.
- An offer is only valid while the site still has no primary or the company that made the offer is still the primary — a stale offer cannot be accepted.
- Offers are sent from the site's Details → Site ownership card, and accepted or cancelled from the site header — see Managing ownership on a site.
What enforcement will change (later)
When ownership enforcement is switched on platform-wide, on sites that have a primary:
- Shared site fields (name, address, coordinates, images, site notes) and structure become read-only for secondaries, shown with a Managed by <company> hint. Own-connection settings stay editable for every control room.
- End users on the site keep people/roles, notifications, notices, and panic — but site identity and structure edits route to the primary company.
Self-managed sites are untouched: the end user keeps full rights. The docs will be updated when enforcement ships; until then, treat everything on this page as informational bookkeeping that gets your fleet's ownership records straight ahead of time.