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Hi, we have a new client that has multiple legal entities (companies) they all share the same chart of accounts, base currency, etc. so we are setting them up as companies (as opposed to tenants). We have the option when creating these of having one actual ledger that the multiple companies share or a separate actual ledger for each company. I was wondering if anyone had any pros/cons for the right way to configure this. They do have a few inter company transactions that they will book manually as they did not purchase the inter company module. Is it better for one reason or another to share the same actual ledger or is it better for them to have separate actual ledgers. Are there any reporting problems with separate or any recording problems with shared?
I would go with one Ledger, even with multiple Companies that are separate legal entities. I've done that before and it worked great. You can still filter on Companies / Branches in the ARM Financial Report Writer. Having multiple Actual Ledgers would "actually" make financial reporting more complicated.
The only situation that I know of where multiple Actual Ledgers makes sense is when you need to create a Ledger that consolidates data from other Tenants.
But that situation is often because those Companies have a different base currencies so they couldn't be handled under one Tenant. At the Summit last year, they mentioned on the roadmap that you'll soon be able to have multiple base currencies under one Tenant. I'm wondering if we might see this get introduced in Acumatica 2020 R1:
https://twitter.com/TimRodman/status/1090267177612005376
You can already have multiple base currencies across projects:
Be careful - There may be a legal requirement to have separate ledgers for separate legal entities, even though using a single "Actual Ledger" in Acumatica seems to be a good solution. Especially in Micro Loans (Financial) businesses that have additional regulatory requirements.
Further my question: I would like to understand if the segregation of data for ledgers even between companies within 1 tenant, and companies across multi-tenants can be "housed" in separate databases, that are related (or linked), but could be delinked is a possibility? Possible regulatory audit requirement!
Oftentimes though with auditors it's just a matter of explanation and defining terms. What an auditor calls a "ledger", Acumatica calls a "company", etc. From a structural standpoint, Ledger and Company are just columns in the General Ledger database tables.
Is there a way to split a Tenant into multiple Databases? That would be interesting. As far as I've seen, everything in an Instance (URL), including all Tenants in that Instance, gets stored in one Database. You can have multiple Instances pointing to one Database, but I'm not sure how you would have one Instance pointing to multiple Databases.
Don't get too caught up in two companies sharing a single ledger. Each company's instance of the ledger is still unique to the company. Don't forget that that multiple companies already share a tenant and a database. It's just another data construct. Fear not!