I noticed in Kinetic, there is a Tax ID field on the Site maintenance detail screen similar to the Company level Tax ID field on the company configuration screen. I don’t remember this being in any previous versions.
Does anyone know if these are used in the same manner? Would this essentially give you the ability to not have to create a multi-company set up for locations with different Tax ID’s?
I know the rule of thumb has always been if you have any subsidiaries that are their own legal entity or have their own Tax ID, then you should set them up as their own company inside of Epicor. Our company has multiple subsidiaries that all work exactly the same and share pretty much all the same data. We would essentially like to set them up as sites using this Tax ID code instead of separate companies that then have to share global data.
This is the typical way to do it, but I suspect that many companies like yours want to do the subsidiary=site method
to eliminate the multi-company setup and overhead
and because the GL Controls could be designed to allow this to work out properly in your GL
and make the independent reporting requirements for each Tax ID simple)
My initial thoughts are that I think this would work - but I would do some simple setup to support this structure (all the way through the GL) and test it thoroughly.
I’m sure someone here has a similar setup and maybe even a financial consultant who can assist you - hopefully they will see this!
This is a massive question and is far bigger than what the Tax ID field does.
Short version: Setup your Companies and Sites in a way that makes the most sense to your business. You can (for the most part) deal with the financials and make them work the way you want to. Don’t handcuff yourself to the Tax ID fields.
Deciding on whether your business entities are Companies or Sites is a huge strategic decision that will affect everything you do and is no simple feat to change your mind later. There is no (at least publicly available) conversion process for changing a Site to a Company or vice versa.
Do these entities interact with each other (intercompany sales)? Do they transfer goods back and forth between them (inventory transfers)? Are they in different countries? Do they use different currencies? Do they share users? Do they share employees?
Companies are mostly separate with the ability to do some intercompany sales and multi company consolidations.
Sites are mostly combined but you can separate many (but not all) things at the financial level using the Division segment of the GL.
@MikeGross@Chad_Smith Thank you both for the input. To give you a bit more background, we are actually using Epicor DataFlo today. We are beginning our implementation to Kinetic in the near future and I figured I’d start asking a few questions on here to see how others are handling this. We definitely have a few business questions on our side we need to answer first before we truly commit to a structure.
Due to system limitations, today we do have to handle the intercompany transactions similar to the way separate companies in Kinetic would interact. I.e., creating each subsidiary as a customer and supplier then create sales orders and purchase orders to transfer inventory. Same country and currency for all the subsidiaries which helps keeps things a bit more simple. Users and employees are mostly separated with a few exceptions. Site level user security is more than capable of handling what we need.
We will be modifying our GL structure to something more usable when we switch to Kinetic. Using a division segment is for sure something that is in the cards to help. I honestly think setting them up as sites will be the way to go but it will come down to how the finance team wants to see the data.
Again, super simplified but for the most part, you markup (optional) and sell things between companies. You transfer inventory (at cost) between sites.
If you do want both stand alone and consolidated financials, there are a few things that can get tricky in a multi-site scenario. Whether these are important or not vary from one installation to the next. That isn’t to say they can’t be dealt with out of the box, but in some scenarios you might consider some custom posting rules if the out of the box solution doesn’t quite fit.
It’s big decision and it’s painful and expensive if you choose wrong. I know it’s a hassle to do so, but your best option is to pilot it out enough to make an educated decision. Setup both the multi company option and the multi site option and run some data through and see which feels better.
Best of luck and keep up the questions if you are unsure.
