Multiple Companies sharing Jobs

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Databuild holds an unlimited number of companies where each company has its own jobs and accounting transactions.

These companies may or may not share system data such as cost centre breakdown, suppliers and pricing.

 

However there are situations where you want different companies for legal and accounting reasons, but would prefer to have all the jobs from different companies shown together for estimating, ordering and job control.

 

Why

Such a situation could arise where

 

You are merging several companies into one
Some Jobs are being run on a joint venture basis
An old company is being phased out
All new jobs are being processed by a new company. Work in progress continues in the old

 

How

There is a way to do this, and with a little setup and care works well:

Setup each company with the same Job and System Database
Setup a Transaction Database for each company (one of the companies can retain the existing transaction by not having a transaction database)
Setup Job Group(s) for each company.
Assign each job to a group within its company
Define group colours for each Job group so that all groups within a company have the same colour
Apply Job colour factory settings.
Set each company background colour to match

 

The Pitfalls

Because all jobs from all the companies are visible in every company, it is easy to post transactions to the correct job in the wrong company. The colour coding helps eliminate this problem.
Suppliers reporting and processing is on a company by company basis. So a supplier may receive payments from each company, and there is no overall supplier reporting
Consolidation is at the general ledger level. You cannot get combined job cost reports over all companies