Company structures

To reflect a complex organization, an LN system can consist of multiple companies. A logistic company can cross borders and include several plants or other business units in different countries. However, financial companies are restricted to one currency area to conduct the accounting and tax reporting of each business unit in each country’s local currency.

Note: Hardware limitations and restricted data replication possibilities can, in some cases, force you to define a separate logistic and financial company for each entity or LN server.

The companies of a multicompany structure must share specific tables and can optionally share other tables.

The financial results of the activities that are carried out in a logistic company, such as production, purchase of materials, and the sales of the product, are posted to financial companies.

Logistic companies contain enterprise units, which are linked to financial companies for their financial reporting. In this way, the logistic and financial companies are linked to each other through the enterprise units. The logistic and financial companies that have links with each other form a multicompany structure.

Enterprise-wide transactional data and logistic and commercial master data is maintained in a logistic company.

Note: 

A large organization can consist of multiple multicompany structures. In this case, each multicompany structure consists of a set of companies and servers. Separate multicompany structures cannot share data.

You must use sales and purchase relations for goods transfer between multicompany structures in the same way as for goods transfer to and from external business partners.

Multicompany structure types

Depending on your business requirements and the technical possibilities, you can set up these combinations of logistic companies and financial companies in a multicompany structure:

  • Single logistic/single finance
  • Single logistic/multifinance
  • Multilogistic/single finance
  • Multilogistic/multifinance
Note: The companies of a multicompany structure must all use the same currency system. If parts of your organization need to use different multicurrency systems or different sets of home currencies, you must create separate multicompany structures for these parts.