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Organizations and Projects

Organizations and projects provide a hierarchical structure for organizing your extraction workflows in Sterndesk.

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Hierarchy Overview

Organization
└── Project
    ├── Extraction Schema
    ├── Upload Collector → Uploads → Extractions
    └── Crawl Collector → Crawls → Extractions
Organizations are the top-level container. They group related projects together and serve as the boundary for team access and billing. Projects belong to an organization and contain all the resources needed for a specific extraction workflow: extraction schemas, collectors (upload collectors and crawl collectors), and the resulting extractions.

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Authentication and Access Control

API keys grant access to all organizations and projects that the associated user is a member of. When you authenticate with an API key, you can:
  • List and manage organizations you belong to
  • Create, update, and delete projects within those organizations
  • Access all resources (schemas, collectors, extractions) within those projects
See Authentication for details on obtaining and using API keys.
API keys inherit the permissions of the user they belong to. A user can be a member of multiple organizations, and their API key provides access to all of them.

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Common Use Cases

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Separating Customers

If you’re building a platform that processes documents for multiple customers, create a separate project for each customer: 
My Company (Organization)
├── Acme Corp (Project)
├── Globex Inc (Project)
└── Initech (Project)
This ensures complete data isolation between customers—each project’s data is entirely separate.

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Deployment Environments

Use separate projects within an organization to manage different environments: 
My Company (Organization)
├── Ocean Research - Development (Project)
├── Ocean Research - Staging (Project)
└── Ocean Research - Production (Project)
This allows you to test extraction schemas and workflows before deploying to production, while keeping all environments under the same organization.

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Teams or Departments

Organizations can represent different teams or business units: 
Finance Department (Organization)
├── Expense Reports (Project)
└── Vendor Invoices (Project)

Legal Department (Organization)
├── Contract Review (Project)
└── Compliance Documents (Project)

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API Reference

For detailed information on creating, updating, and deleting organizations and projects, see the API Reference:

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Next Steps

Extraction Schemas

Define the structure of data you want to extract

Collectors

Set up upload and crawl collectors to ingest documents