The following video shows how organisations with multiple companies can manage these much more effectively using the CBIZ Business Central extension – Business Companies.
The full transcript of the video is below:
This is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. This is the user-friendly interface that finance users will typically see when you log in.
If you’re familiar with Business Central, then you know that usually, one most go-between companies if you want to, for instance, submit a purchase order or invoices or submit VAT returns you have to go to my settings and go into allowed companies and select a company. And then go through my workload and do my job that way.
However, what if I have a portfolio of many different companies? And I need to post journals and VAT returns for each of those companies. Well, with standard functionality, I would have to go through each one and do that individually.
With the CBIZ new extension – Business Companies, this can be done a lot more quickly. This can be done by using dimensions. What we have done is taken the standard functionality of dimensions, and we have tweaked and changed it so that now invoices can be posted and ascribed a company code.
Journals can be posted with multiple different business companies at once as long as those business companies are balanced for each journal via the company code.
Also, you can filter the chart of accounts to see any given company via the company code. Let’s explore some of this. Let’s start with purchase invoices. Let’s make a new purchase invoice. The master data, such as vendors or customers, is shared data. We can easily assign a business company for the invoice, give it an invoice number, What do we want to buy? Let’s pick and item and pick a company. Notice critically that the line information is pulled from the header.Ok, let’s post that.
Now we have another purchase invoice, let’s open this one as well. As standard, we would have had to switch companies. Now with the help of Business Companies, we can stay within the company. So let’s pick another item and quantity. We haven’t got a company code assigned. This time we will go with a different company. You have changed the dimension (yes please), so the dimension is now on the line. Let’s post that one. So we have posted some invoices.
When it comes to the time to make our payment run with standard functionality, we would have had to have dome this multiple times depending on how many companies we had. Now what we can do is to do it all from one journal. Go to payment journals prepare to suggest vendor payments. Set the date far into the future to collect all invoices. Click to fetch those then we go to invoices due for payment. Critically note that we have multiple business companies here, so multiple companies have their invoices paid at once.
We can come back to that. Let me show you first what we needed to do to set up those companies. So in Business Companies, we create them here by clicking new. We can add company info, VAT number if we go to bank accounts and add a bank account for each company. We can also put in some controls so for instance, allowed posting dates or assign a company a user responsible for it.
We can get back to our payment journal, and we can post a journal when we are ready. There is a check some invoices don’t have an assigned company these cannot be posted until they have been assigned to a company. The same goes for general tasks and general posting. Say we made a general journal and we posted all manner of invoices for different expenses the one rule is that they all must have a business company and for each business company the journal must be balanced then it will post before you couldn’t have multiple dimensions in one journal, with business companies that is the new exception.
What else can you do? Well, you can submit separate MTD VAT for all member companies or do group VAT for members. You can close years separately or all together. There is dimensional consistency, and it keeps discrete accounts for each company. We can even look and see our data for all our transactions. If we go to chart of accounts, if we want to see only the finances for a particular company, then we can use filters here to pick a company and then we will only see data of posted information for that company. There we go, we can see expenses for the invoices we posted earlier. We can change to our other companies and look here.
Who might this be useful for?
If you are a fund management business, club, a society, franchises, and regional organisations, this can save you plenty of time and money and increase your productivity. If you have been inspired or would like to explore this further, then please do contact us.
You can email us at info@cbiz.co.uk or phone 0330 088 2515. Thanks very much.
