A “company” in Company Agents is the top-level container. It holds teams, clients, agents, workflows, budgets, memory, and an audit log. One install can host any number of them. You create a company from the home screen of the desktop app (the screen you see before you have picked a company), or from the CLI with company-agents new.

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The fields

Name. What the company is called. Shows in the sidebar, the audit log, and the org chart. Use a real name, not a placeholder. Examples from our own accounts: Acme Studio, Ampha Rebuild, Company Agents Internal. Slug. Auto-generated from the name. URL-safe. You can override it if the default is ugly. The slug shows up in command-line output and in log filenames, so keep it short. Description. One sentence for what this company does. The Executive Assistant reads this to ground its answers, so make it accurate. “A boutique web design agency run by one human and a small team of agents” is better than “My stuff”. Monthly budget. The company-wide spend cap in dollars. This is the outermost ring of the stacked budget system, so every other cap underneath it is constrained by this number. Default is $500. You can raise it later, but starting tight and raising as you learn is the correct move. Fiscal period. Most companies use a calendar month (resets on the 1st). Some use a rolling 30-day window instead. Pick one, you can change it later. The audit log and cost dashboard show trends against this period. Starting teams. Check the boxes for which teams you want pre-created. Defaults are Engineering, Design, Marketing, Ops. Uncheck the ones you do not need. You can add or delete teams any time from the org structure page. Default adapter. Which CLI adapter new agents should use unless you override per-agent. Claude Code is the default. You can change this at any time, and per-agent overrides always win over the company default.

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What happens when you click Create

Behind the scenes:
  1. A new row lands in the companies table of your local database
  2. A directory is created at ~/.company-agents/instances/default/companies/{slug}/
  3. The starting teams are inserted with their default budgets
  4. A Chairperson seat is created for you (the human)
  5. The company is registered with the orchestrator so the dashboard can render it
  6. The audit log gets its first entry: company.created by={your_name}
You are dropped into the empty company dashboard, ready to hire your first agent.

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From the CLI

Everything above is also available without the UI: 
company-agents new "Acme Studio" \
  --description "A boutique web design agency" \
  --budget 500 \
  --teams engineering,design,marketing \
  --default-adapter claude-code
The CLI version is handy when you are scripting a fresh environment, running a demo, or reproducing a bug report.

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Importing an existing company

If someone else gave you a company export (a .company-agents.yaml sidecar plus its associated files), you import it instead of creating from scratch: 
company-agents import ./acme-studio-export.yaml
See importing and exporting for the full format and workflow.

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What to do next