Hi,

Can anyone explain the differences between a group company, a financial company, and logistic company ... and single site/multisite.

Thanks in advance.:confused:

Hi,

you can have different configurations :

1. single company, being a logistical company only (so no integration to Finance), or only financial (only having financial transactions, without any logistical transactions) or a company being 'integrated', so having both financial and logistical transactions (classical example : having distribution purchase orders and receipts that are integrated into the financial part through the 'integration with other module').

2. single finance company with muti logistic companies. There you will say to each logistical companies that they have to send their transaction to the financial company to be integrated (define logistic company by financial company).

3. single logistic company to multi financial companies. The idea here could be that logistically wize, you want to keep in 'smaller', and then will have to specify which part of these transactions need to be sent to which financial company. In general this is defined at warehouse level (having one warehouse representing a business unit, or legal entity...).

4. multi logistic to multi finance. There you can have a mix of points 2 and 3, but classically it's used to have each logistical company linked to one and only one financial company.

5. group company. This is pure financial, and doesn't have anything to do with logistics. The idea beneath that is if you would like to represent each business unit as a separate financial entity, but still having the possibility to group and view the company results in one 'group' company.

This is valid for the BaaN 4b2 version (the one I'm using), but I'm not sure it's the same for latest versions.

The restrictions to create a group company are : all the financial companies in the group must have the same home currency as the same country.

Hope this helps ?..? Good luck, and if you decide to go to multi-company environment, try as much as possible to 'share' tables between them to reduce the maintenance of each of them !!

Georges.

Thank you so much for the very detailed explanation!!! This is exactly what I was looking for !

Adding to what Georges said,

Technically:
A Logistics Company has at least one logistics table and provides data and functionality in Common (tc) and in one or more of the logistics packages Distribution (td), Manufacturing (ti), Transportation (tr), Service (ts), Project (tp) or Process (ps).
A Finance Company has at least one finance table and provides data and functionality in the packages Common (tc) and Finance (tf).

Note that a given Baan company number can provide data and functionality in both Finance and Logistics (i.e., it can be both a Finance Company and a Logistics Company) even though there is no integration from Logistics to Finance.

A Group Company is not a separate company per se but rather the company that is designated to define and hold some common rules for a group of finance companies that will process information between each other.
As Georges indicated, the companies in a group must share a home currency.
o In Triton and in Baan IV without the MCR (Multi-Currency) extension, this means all companies in the group must have the same home currency.
o In Baan IV with MCR, and also in Baan V/ERP, the requirement is relaxed somewhat because each company may have multiple reporting currencies. Obviously, the companies in a group must still have a common currency in order to process inter-company financial information and/or to consolidate financial results.
Without multiple currency functionality, all companies in the group are required to have the same country.
The companies in the group must have the same number of financial periods (fiscal, tax and reporting). (How would you consolidate or report finance data for the group if one company has 7 Fiscal periods and another has 12?)
The use of Dimension Types is enabled at the group company level and the name of each Dimension Type is set at the group level.
The multi-company structure (Single/Single, Single/Multi, Multi/Single, Multi/Multi) is defined at the Group Company level.


Georges’ last suggestion can’t be overemphasized. If you are considering implementing a multi-site Baan environment, be sure that you get help to fully understand the technical and functional implications. You need to know which tables can be shared, which should be shared, which cannot or should not be shared, and why. Considerably more than table maintenance is a stake.

Scott

Hello Scott,

nice amendum that you did here, and you mentionned a point I ignored : the MCR on BaaN IV.

Would this mean that within a group you could have companies with different home currencies ? I'm very interested in that one, as we're currently looking at creating a 'german group' in our company, but we have issues with Switzerland, as they are not operating yet in Euro's.

Could you give me some explanations on that functionality ?

Thanks in advance, Geo.

Hi Georges,

Sorry for the delayed response. My quick answer was to be a qualified "yes" but I didn't have a Baan IV company with MCR in front of me and wanted to check with a colleague before sticking my foot any farther into my mouth.:eek:

As long as one reporting currency -- specifically, the first currency -- is the same in each company in the group, the alternate currencies can presumably be different in each company. Baan requires that the first currency in each member of the group be the same to enable consolidations and intercompany transactions.

I say "presumably" because I have not actually implemented or worked in an MCR environment with different alternate currencies. Perhaps someone else can give feedback on how well this works in practice. I do know that there have been some rounding issues with MCR that Baan has not yet fixed to the satisfaction of one [North American] client. It is possible that these issues might be accentuated if the companies in the group had different alternate currencies.

The answer above is specifically related to Baan IV with MCR.

Scott

We have had MCR on 4c3 for approx 3 years as we have 2 financial companies that report in Euros & 1 that reports in GB£. They all share the same logistic company as basically they all sell the same items; they just happen to operate in different countries. We have Euro as home currency 1, GB£ as home currency 2.
It works ok for our purposes but it is a nightmare to keep patched (which we try to avoid) as many patches just don't work first time out as I guess they just don't get tested properly for MCR. So if you can avoid MCR, do!
We are just starting to test a migration to 4c4 MCR with a view to going live in June. Hopefully this will be more stable!
There are rounding problems with 4c3 MCR in that you can't easily do a close year as they never balance without GTM intervention. But you get the same issue with transactional currencies as well.
We have never needed to have alternative HC2 or HC3 as 3 currencies were enough.

RE: There are rounding problems with 4c3 MCR in that you can't easily do a close year as they never balance without GTM intervention.

A client I worked with recently has also had rounding problems that prevented "normal" year-end close with MCR in 4c4.

Their assessment was similar. MCR was implemented across all companies for consistency. It does the job in companies where multiple currency reporting is required, but because of maintenance and rounding issues, they have some regrets about having implemented MCR in companies where it was not a functional requirement.

Scott

Hello all,

I would like to understand more about multi-site financial structure because of business requirement, would you mind sharing some reference document such as multi-logistic / single-finance, multi-logistic / multi-finance ? Thank you very much.

Warm regards,
Lucy

PVRC : B40c2
Oracle DB : 8.1.7.4.0 , 8.1.7.4.1
OS : SUN Unix, Windows
Lucy_Jih@htc.com.tw

I fully understand why all companies belonging to one group company would need to be on the same currency (same for financial and reporting period tables), but I never got my head around why they would need to be the same country (talking about B4c4).
Some consultants we asked about this simply suggested to hack around (GTM) this limitation, as they also never understood why this was.

Robert

Thanks for your reply, Robert.

Warm regards,
Lucy

I just noticed my post from a good while ago....

We did upgrade to 4c4 MCR and it is a much more reliable system.

We have our 3 financial companies with a spoof country called "EU" - I guess the country may have to be the same for tax reasons.

Ed

If you have different countries within the multisite structure this may have an impact on the intrastat and sales statistic update.
Concerning tax calculation you may exclude the table "Tax Code by country" from the shared tables.
This is valid for MCR, but I think also in standard.

I am interested how the others solved the problem with the update of intrastat and similars.

Regards, Juli