I want to setup a business with multiple branches. The business operates as one company.
I would like to set up each branch as a single company all of them having the same company parent. This will allow me to have different reports by company and setup pricing, taxes, user persmissions, etc for each company individually. However, I am struggling with setting up the bank accounts and relative chart of accounts. Seems like that I cannot setup a shared bank account between companies, but all the branches will share the same bank accounts.
The alterntive is that I set up just 1 company and I use accounting dimension “branch” to differentiate. However it seem that i cannot use this to have different pricing and tax rules for the various branches.
The only thing I can think of is to use the parent/child feature for the accounts. This might be unacceptable because only the parent account will have the correct balance.
Thank you. I am now considering POS profiles.
These will allow me to have specific pricelist, taxes, etc
Hi,
Are you saying to work with only one company and then create sub-accounts for the various branches?
I want to work on a multi-company setup as this makes many things easier. Even if it is 1 company but operating in multiple branches needs to have clear and easy split of permission and tracking of flow of goods.
Users will only have access to specific company (especially for warehouses and stock movements, and better for tracking Accounts)
Better flow of goods management (users from branch 1 can initiate a delivery request from branch 2 but then branch 2 needs to manage the shipment). without multi-company I cannot find an easy way to have a good management of items between branches)
Ideally I do not have to use multi-company but it allows many important functionality regarding inter-company flows that are just not there for intra-company flows (internal customers/suppliers).
I tried to use Branches as accounting dimension to track sales and POS to help on the customer invoicing but it is not as smooth as using multi-company. Also this does not address intra/inter - company movements very well.
I think the only solution that I have is to go for multi-company. this gives the issue of some Accounts that are difficult to share between branches (e.g. bank accounts). and will need to add different processes to make sure that the bank transactions are under control.
But maybe I am overcomplicating or not aware of some other features?
It seem to me a common use case of companies wanting strict user permission to limit not just functionalities/doctypes but also area of the company. Also add control over intra-company flows. Is this a good topic for additial feature request? I think something could be done with the accounting dimensions. e.g. a flag that will treat that accounting dimensions the same as Company(except for creating separate COAs) and then you will have manadatory input in doctypes such as Assets, Warehouses, Transactions…
The parent relationship would be for the top level company which would be a group.
The parent company will be the “master chart of accounts”. When you create child companies
it copies the chart of accounts from the parent. The combined transactions from all child
companies will roll up to the parent. That’s why I say the balance will only be correct at the parent level.