Managing multisite organizations

An international organization with offices in many countries may be represented in SunSystems in various ways, depending on how the organization operates. They may be defined as:

  • many individual customers, one for each site, each with their own individual ledger account because each site is responsible for its own business.
  • many customers, one for each site, that all share a single ledger account because the account is controlled at a group level.

An organization may use a combination of the above. For example, if each country in a multi-national organization has a central account site with branch offices, each branch would be a separate customer linked to the ledger account for the appropriate country.

Multi-Site Organization Account Holders

A multi-site organization contains a number of locations or sites, all of which you deal with individually, but has only one central invoicing or remittance point. This is usually the case if the organization has a centralized accounting function.

Each site or location is defined as a separate customer or supplier. One site acts as the invoicing customer or remittance supplier for the group and this site is referred to as the account holder. This is the only customer or supplier to reference a chart of accounts code. All of the other site customer or supplier records point to the account holder in either the Invoicing Customer or Remittance Supplier field.

This concept is illustrated below for customers:

multisite-cust.png

To set up a multi-site organization, you create the account holding customer or supplier first and assign, or create, the corresponding debtor/receivables or creditor/payables account. For all of the other customers or suppliers in the group, you identify the account holding customer or supplier as the invoicing customer or remittance supplier.

Defining Multiple Account Holders

A multisite organization with more than one account holder is represented as many separate multi-site organizations. An example of this would be a multinational company with, in each country, one account holder site and many other sites; each country would be set up as a multisite organization.

To move the account from one site to another first requires the new account holder to be a member of the group. The transfer is done by transferring the account code to the new account holder and repointing all other customers or suppliers in the group to it.

Changing the Account Holder in a Multi-Site Organization

A multi-site organization is represented by many customers, only one of which is the account holder. The following steps are required to move the account holder from one customer site to another:

  1. Remove the account from the account holder customer by removing the Account Code.
  2. Add the Account Code to the customer for the new account holder.
  3. For all of the other customer sites, change the invoicing customer or supplier code to that of the new account holder.