All,
Does any one have any experience of comparing sites vs companies - pros & cons
Saw this but it’s a very old post:
Happy for any one liners
Thanks
Matt
The post you oulined is correct as it all depends how your company deal with how financials are reported…
In our case, we have one company, with three sites.
Pierre
Agreed with @Hogardy, that post makes all the points I would have, though it’s rough reading a run-on paragraph like that.
We just brought in a sister entity as a site in February. I stand firmly behind it, but it was not easy, as we want separated financials for each. I went down both paths in a test environment and absolutely hated the company path. My reason was the part master.
Our two entities are a truck manufacturing plant (that also sells the trucks) and a sales division that sells spare parts and ships warranty parts. We are so interconnected that multi-site was the only sane way to do it, I feel. Multi-company promises that you can have a “global” part master but it’s very tenuous. If part master is A-1 priority like it was for us, multi-site is the answer.
However, as the post and Pierre said, I agree that financials are honestly the biggest consideration, and if you have separate tax IDs, it’s a non-starter - you must do multi-company.
But I think if corporate ever came on Epicor, I’d make them a company. Their structure is vastly different from ours.
@Hogardy and @JasonMcD are right, there are lot of things to consider. Just a few more questions to get you started:
- Do you have more than 1 legal entity?
- Will you be using Avalara to calculate sales tax?
- Do you use sell to the same customers and user the same part numbers?
- Do you transfer parts between locations?
- If you are Multi-Company those become POs and Sales Orders
- If you are Multi-Site you can user Transfer Orders
I have managed 2 tax ID’s in 1 company and it was a mixed bag. Taxes and Finance was tricky at times, but we shared all parts and customers so that saved a lot of multi company setup. There is no ‘right’ way. There are best practices but at the end of the day it needs to work for you.
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@amurdock I say that because (1) I always heard that, and (2) Tax ID is a setting on Company. But here we do act like two companies (I think we actually were many years ago), so if we ever did split again, yeah I’d hate to split us into multi-company, so I definitely see why you’d make it work as sites.
I’m amazed you could have a common customer base. We use the same customers and vendors, but we have duplicates on purpose. I can’t imagine keeping things straight without it. I mean, yikes.
We always did the Company route, with a single site per company. Mainly because we are multi-national, have tax ids that are separate on all, and don’t share very many customers. Different currency types can be a factor as well.
Separate legal entities - 2 companies
Separate AP & AR? 2 Companies
Single combined AP/AR but separate COGS & Sales by site? one company, multi-site.
I always push for single company wherever possible because moving inventory from site to site is much easier than with multi-company.
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