Manage Multiple Companies Effortlessly in Dynamics 365 Business Central (Video)

Discover the advantages of managing multiple companies within a single Business Central instance and see how Multi-Entity Management can streamline intercompany transactions, consolidated reporting, and user security management. Easily take your data from unknown to actionable.

In this recorded webinar, we share how to:

• Simplify complicated multi-company environments with best-of-breed security and data management
• Optimize your financial processes and enable your company’s future growth
• Centralize and consolidate your reporting into a single environment to make the best business decisions

Transcript below:

Sherry: Good afternoon. My name is Sherry Bettencourt. And I am a Customer Service Associate here at Encore Business Solutions. And I’d like to start by thanking you for joining today’s webinar, Managing Multiple Companies Effortlessly in Dynamics 365 Business Central. Today, all attendees will be in listen-only mode. So if you have any questions as they come up throughout today’s presentation, please type them in the GoTo webinar Q&A or in the chat box in the GoTo Webinar control panel. And we will try to leave a few minutes at the end to address any questions that you have. If we run outta time, I’ll capture those questions and we’ll follow up with you via email.

Just a reminder that today’s webinar is being recorded, and you will receive a link to the recording in the coming day so that you can go ahead and review anything that you heard today, or share that presentation out with your colleagues. At this point, I’m gonna turn over today’s webinar to the team from Binary Stream. Thank you.

Khaled: Thank you much. And thank you everyone for joining us today. Let me start out by just going over our agenda really quickly. We’ll be going over an introduction and today we are excited to be showing you a customer use case in our webinar. We like to contextualize some of the product stories to make sure that this is something that is grounded, and we’re not talking about something very abstract. We will, of course, then go into a solution overview and a demo, and then hopefully have time to address the Q&A.

Today’s presenters are Don Ramsey, a senior solutions consultant here at Binary Stream. I always like to say this about Don, but it almost feels like he’s a vigilante now. He was a controller for many, many years in his life, and now he goes around and helps other controllers figure out their ERP. Don’s a seasoned leader in the industry and we’re very happy to have him present here today on multi-entity management. And of course myself, my name is Khaled Nassra, I’m the head of marketing here at Binary Stream.

We wanted to start out today’s presentation with a statistic. It helps contextualize the ideas that we’re talking about. According to EY from their survey last year for the global financial reporting survey, 74% of CFOs are prioritizing the modernization of their financial reporting processes. And this is something that we’re seeing. It’s not just an abstract stat. We’re seeing this with every CFO that we talk to, where they are trying to optimize their finances, make sure that any overhead that can be cut is cut, and they are not stuck in a system that does not allow them to move flexibly and freely.

And that’s exactly what we strive to do with multi-entity management, and really with all our solutions. Some of you may know about us as Binary Stream. If you do not, we’re an ISV and independent software vendor that has been serving the Microsoft space and channel for over 20 years. We, of course, serve Microsoft Dynamics GP, as well as Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 Finance. Most recently we were a finalist for partner of the year for Dynamics 365 Business Central. We’re a member of the inner circle for business applications with Microsoft. And we’re very, very proud to be a global provider to over 2,000 customers across 25 countries.

A quick glance at all our solutions. I did tease already that we’re gonna be talking about multi-entity management today, but I want you to keep in mind that we also have solutions across subscription billing, property lease management, and of course, healthcare materials management. But about the survey I showed show today on multi-entity management, it’s really a solution to help with automating intercompany transactions processing, establishing clear organizational structures and reporting, and really gaining a lot more insights into their recording and reporting and making sure that you have a single set of massive records. I often ask customers who are looking at multi-entity management if they’re looking to grow. And of course, for most companies, I would say all companies, the answer is yes.

And that means that multi-entity management is a really good fit because it’s a solution that grows with you. It allows you to flexibly add entities, grow into new branches, grow into new locations, grow across multiple departments. And really it truly, I can say that any company that is looking to grow multi-entity management is probably a good fit for them because it is so robust and so comprehensive across the ERP.

So let’s look at one use case. And of course like I said, it’s so horizontal, but today we are looking at Grand Restaurants Inc., which is a global franchising corporation with over 350 locations across North America. They do have a head regional location that manages all their vendor relations, everything else that they have across. But the process for them is very tedious. They can’t really look into all the different locations that they have. They struggle to have any transactions between the warehouses and that’s really hampering their growth.

Some of their goals, pardon, are streamlining intercompany transactions, improving their financial processes, and centralizing reporting across multiple entities. I’m sure that for a lot of you, these three goals resonate and that’s because they are the goals for almost any company that has multiple locations. You’re probably looking at exactly the same things, but unfortunately, there are challenges that stand in the way.

There’s a lot of manual processes. If you’re trying to go through Dynamics 365 Business Central, pardon. On its own, you’re gonna have to go through multiple windows, multiple approval processes for transactions between your entities. You’re gonna have to repeat some of the processes in multiple companies, and there isn’t a way that you can store any criteria or any of the data in a way that can match all across your companies. And you have that problem with accessibility to insights if you’re trying to look at your financial health across multiple companies, or a specific region or one group of companies that is going to create a lot of tedious and manual labor for you.

And you’re probably gonna have to take the data out into Excel or some other tool, and then be able to slice and dice it. And of course, you have a lot of complication with your security structures. If you have a regional manager who should only see the regional data and a branch manager who should only see the branch data, that creates a whole lot of complications. So how do we solve it? Well, that’s what we’re gonna see in the live demo. So I’m gonna hand it over to you, Don. And I’m sure you’re gonna knock out the demo. I’ll pass over the presenter rights to you now.

Don: All right. As soon as I see presenter rights, I will share my screen.

Khaled: Awesome. Thank you.

Don: Let’s see what screen I want to show. Make sure I show you the right one. Give me a second. All right. So you should see a [inaudible 00:07:27].

Khaled: Yeah, we want to see the one with your bank account and all your personal information.

Don: No, I don’t want that out there. No, no, no. You’d be crying, you know, because it’s…Never mind. So can you see my Business Central screen, Khaled?

Khaled: Yes, we can. Thank you so much.

Don: So let’s walk through this. I’m going to try to give you a bit of a visual of some of the things that Khaled said, but a couple of high-level things. First of all, as you’re looking at this, you are seeing a single business central company. And let me prove that. So I go up to my search bar here and I type in companies. It’s going to give me a list of all the BC companies in this environment, and it’s easy to add it up. It’s one. So this Cronus Canada is the only BC company that exists. So there will never be due to/due froms or intercompany transactions requested by Business Central because, well, obviously it thinks it’s one company. Now, what we’re going to do with multi-entity management is we’re going to integrate a ton of companies inside this particular shell.

How do we do it? Well, if I go up to my search bar here and I type in dimensions. So assuming that not everybody knows all about dimensions, let me explain very quickly. Dimensions are probably the single most powerful functionality of Business Central. They allow you to filter data any way that you like. They allow you to ignore having segments on your account structure. You can just deal with a single segment and you can have them anywhere or not at all on every single transaction. Very, very powerful. They can force companies or transactions or dimensions, pardon me, sorry, to work together. Or they can forbid them from working together, all standard out-of-the-box BC functionality.

So we looked at that and we thought, “Great. There are two global dimensions that exist in Business Central today, obviously global dimension one and two. We’re going to pick one of them to represent our company.” And I guess, as you can tell where I’m highlighted here, I’ve picked a global dimension value, global dimension one. I’ve called it Company to make it nice and simple. So in that company, if I look at the actual values, I’ve got Grand Restaurants Incorporated. Let’s assume that’s the head office. I’ve got Store 95, 125 all the way up to 275.

Now, obviously, I don’t have all 350 restaurants in here. That would be a little overwhelming for me to try to manage that. But this gives you an idea. This could be 350 lines long. It could be 1,500 lines long. It doesn’t matter. You can have, as far as I know, an infinite amount of values on this particular dimension. So you can have 1,500 restaurants, 2,000 restaurants, whatever you possibly need.

So the next question becomes this, I’m in a single business central company. Well, that’s all well and good. How do I identify each of my restaurants or my head office for that matter? Or let’s start with head office. Up top, you’ll see multi-entity management setup. If I click on that, this particular company, 000, its legal name is Grand restaurants Inc-head office. There’s my federal ID number, my tax registration number, my email. You get the idea, the unique identifiers that make this separate from the other companies.

I’ve got my billing address information for head office. I’ve got my shipping information address for head office. I can even say, what bank account do I want to use for head office. So keep this in mind, because we’ve said we’re going to do centralized payables. We’re gonna use one bank account to pay the bills for everybody. Do we have to? No, but we can. And that’s what we’re gonna do.

So Worldwide Bank is my default bank account, but all these other banks I may or may not own them. They can simply be shared by other companies for me to use. But if I do, there will likely be due to/due froms that will automatically be calculated in the background by multi-entity management. So very, very powerful.

Next step, I’m in one BC company. So it’s one big block of transactions. I may decide that I wanna make sure that every restaurant that I have in the grand chain is going to have unique document numbers for it itself. So head office will be S-INV-000 for all sales invoices, B-INV-000 for all purchase invoices, and so on and so on. So every single restaurant, whether I have 350 or 1,500 can have unique identifiers for all the transactions.

Obviously, I have not populated everything, but hopefully, you can realize what’s going on here. I wanna dump this information out to Excel, which is an integral part of Business Central I can do it, or I can filter it by the start of the document number. So I can get information that’s just head office, just store 275, just store 350, and so on and so forth. Now, a very minor point here. I think under the present circumstances, you may have location, where you are buying and selling between your restaurants. That happens. You can also do arm’s length, “Hey, I don’t want due to/due froms. I want a purchase order to create a sales order. I want a sales order to create the purchase order purchase document, and I want it automatically to be completed at the other side.” You can do that as well.

So not only can you use due to/due froms to say 95% of your transactions, but you’re gonna have those rare exceptions that require balance sheet, payable, receivable, cut me a check, please, and I’ll square it off no due to/due froms. You can do that part of the outta box functionality as well. So once we’ve got the high-level setup done, and I wanna stress here that we have not changed anything as far as the way Business Central works. Business Central still thinks this global dimension one is just simply a dimension. But what we’re gonna do now is we’re going to make it unique.

So if I go up here to MEM administrator, and by the way, what you’re looking at this screen is me as the administrator in my role. Your role could be very different, but as the MEM administrator, I wanna be able to make sure I can configure everything right from here in just a series of windows. So let’s start at the high-level, multi-entity management setup. I just explained we’re using global dimension one to represent our restaurants, all right? So head office, 350 locations, doesn’t matter. They’re all based on global dimension one. That’s great. Keeps it nice and simple. Now, one of the big strengths of MEM, I don’t wanna have 350 copies of my customer list or my vendor list or my warehouse list, or whatever the case might be. I want just one master record. Think of the logic here.

One business central company, one set of master records, one set of charts as far as account structures are concerned. So I’ve got one set of customers, one set of vendors. But because we’ve got MEM involved now, I can restrict who sees what vendors, what customers, what bank accounts. So I can lock down a particular restaurant so tight if I need to, but it can…Only its user can only see itself and only see the master records that have been assigned to it. They can’t see the other restaurants. They can’t see the financials for them. They can’t do anything. Or it could be a head office AP clerk who needs to see everybody. No sweat, all gonna be separate. Each level of security will apply to each user.

So keep that in mind, greatly simplifying the master records. One set of master records, that I get control over who gets to use it. If I scroll down all the way to purchase and payables, you’ll see, I’ve got it set for decentralized. I could go ahead and activate this pencil and make it centralized, pardon me. But I do wanna oversee decentralized. Everybody pays their own bills. Well, maybe you didn’t, maybe you wanna centralized. Let’s do that. Now it’s centralized, simple as that. Now you’ll notice that I’m in an administrative box here. So what I am saying here is as the administrator, as the guy who has got control of multi-entity and basically BC, I’m dictating that everything’s gonna be centralized. We’re gonna pay all the payables from one bank account and all the appropriate due to/due froms will show up as required.

Now, typically most companies just so you understand this, I will not spend a lot of time on it. Typically, most companies have a single due to the form structure, restaurant to restaurant to restaurant, for example. But if you had other layers where you also need in your company or this right here, I could nest them. I could say, “Here’s my restaurant chain due to/due froms. Now I have a department that I also need due to/due froms.” Now, usually, this is a fund, that type of thing within companies. Just understand it’s there. We’re not gonna spend a lot of time looking at it from this stage of the game. So we got the high-level setup.

Now let’s go to the next step. What about my users? Well, in Business Central, my users are my users. I’m not changing anything. So all these users, if I look at, for example, from the company perspective, there’s every user that’s in my database, my Azure database that Business Central is sitting on, but only the ones that are checked off can do any transactions with Company 0, can do any inquiries in Company 0, can see anything for Company 0. That’s it. If I look at Company, say, 400, it could be a different list. I got another person who’s actually involved in this. If I go up to 900, it changes once again. We don’t change the list. These are the users who have access to the database that you’re sitting on, but we do get to control completely what particular companies they get to do business in.

So keep in mind, this list is controlling, not administrative access, but it’s controlling user access. As a user, if I as the power user, as the full administrator, go to look at all my companies, if I haven’t been given access to a company, I can’t do transactions in it. I can’t run inquiries in it. I can’t run reports for it. It just doesn’t exist from a user perspective. So that’s my user setup. And by the way, while I’m showing you the nice and exciting step-by-step, mouse click by mouse click, keep in mind we can import this from Excel spreadsheet as well, the setup I’m talking about. So now I’ve got my users assigned what companies can they access. Now, let’s step up to the company level.

What can they see as far as my master records are concerned? So keep that in mind. Single set up master records, a single chart of accounts, single vendor file, single bank account file. Can be as long as you like, but it’s a single file. Very easy to maintain that way. So if I look at my vendor list, now in my demo environment, it’s not huge, but there’s my vendor list that all the restaurants can access. So any Grand Restaurant can turn around and do business for Company 0…Oh, this is head office, so Grand Restaurant head office. It can use all the vendors. So that kind of makes sense. But what if I’m store number 400, restaurant 400?

My master list is going to be three vendors deep. So if I’m the administrator for restaurant 400, I can come in here and I wanna buy food supplies or whatever the case might be, these are the vendors I have access to. The others won’t show up. They’re simply not available and there’s nothing I can do about it. They do not exist. It’s as simple as that, all right? And that would apply to any of the master record items that you see here. So very, very quick and easy. So hopefully you get the idea. We’ve got the dimension value dictating what restaurants we have. Now, we’ve got our users, so the standard business central database users, we’re restricting them to what restaurants they can see. Now we’re turning around and saying, “Okay, for the restaurants themselves, what master records can they see?”

So you can see how we’re tightening it down. We’re making each restaurant very unique or not. Maybe the restaurants are unique in what they can do, but maybe head office, all the people there have that full access. Absolutely, no problem to do that very, very simply with multi-entity management. Now, since we’re talking one BC company what’s never gonna happen? We’re never going to have a request for due to/due froms, not from BC, but man, we will. And therefore we need to have our due to/due froms configured. Now, I apologize in advance me, as an accountant, I like it very unique. Intercompany Company 0 owes Company 100 that’s gonna be in there. Only transactions from Company 0 that owes Company 100.

Well, that sounds great when I got four or five or 10 companies, but if I had 1,500 companies and I made every relationship unique, I’d have a million or two accounts. Well, that’s not gonna work. So what else could we do? Well, I could do this. I could just simply say I have two accounts, intercompany AP, Intercompany AR, and I’m done and that’s it. Now, why do I get away with that? Or why can I get away with that? Because every single transaction in this account number will be identified by the owner. So I will know if it was head office or restaurant 350 or restaurant 175. I will know, even though it’s captured in a single account structure. At the end of the process, I’ll show you that in action.

So basically that gives you a high-level overview of how MEM works. Now, is there more? Yes, but in the time that we have, let’s go take a look at an actual transaction. So I’m gonna pick on the standard purchase invoice. As you see what I’m doing here so far, it is standard business central. I have not re-coded anything. However, with the MEM layer of security, you’ll notice this company dimension here is now MEM enabled. So this belongs to Company or Restaurant 00. This belongs to Restaurant 100, this one to Restaurant 600. So all the zeros are head office. All the other numbers are particular restaurants. Now, we said we had 350. Looks like I have 600, but who cares?

I got a lot of restaurants. The bottom line is, every single transaction for every restaurant that I am accountable for is gonna show up in a standard Business Central dropdown list. Now, what if I wanted to do a transaction in Restaurant 200? Well, up here to New, do I have access to 200? Yep. I do, Restaurant 200, LET’S open it up, and let’s say, “Okay.” So what am I in now? When this window pops up? I’m in a standard Business Central window with a dimension value added to the header. Please take note of what I said, a standard dimension value.

You can do this yourself outta the box, dimension value on the header, dimension column on the body, I’m good to go. Simple as that. Now, if I take my vendor list… Hey, wait a minute. I thought I had like 15 or 20 vendors. No, I’ve only got four vendors in my master list for Company 2 out of Restaurant 200. So if I pick say a vendor 20,000, it’s gonna lock me in. I’m gonna put in a little bit of a unique identifier here, standard BC. So I’ve got Restaurant 200 owns the document. That’s great. It gets the payable because it’s a purchase invoice. If this was a sales invoice would look exactly the same, but it would be who gets the receivable bottom line . Who gets in this case, the expense?

Well, it’s also Restaurant 200. That’s wonderful. So let’s go, let’s say we’re paying an insurance bill, all right? So we got this insurance bill here, we’re gonna process this. We’re gonna have just one of them, and it’s 20 grand. Insurance bill, Company 1,200 gets, 200, pardon me, gets the payable, Restaurant 200 gets the expense. Well, if there’s any accountants listening in, there’s nothing going show up here other than the two-line distribution. Payable, expense, done, it’s over. But what if I had access to Company or Restaurant 000 or head office, and I’m working at Restaurant 200 right now? Well, I could buy this piece of insurance.

I’m gonna have the payable in Restaurant 200, but guess what? They get the expense. So if I look at this, go to my posting preview, I should have a four-line distribution that’s going to show up here in just a couple of minutes. And when it shows up, why is it four lines? Because I’ve got the owner of the transaction giving the payable, Restaurant 200, I got head office getting the expense, so there’s IOUs here. You’ll notice nothing in here is editable. It’s locked in place. It’s 100% balanced, 100% of the transaction is visible right here. I don’t need to go to another BC company or develop some kind of a fancy report to get at the rest of the information. It’s right here.

Now, let’s make this even more fun. Let’s back out and let’s add what we call an allocation template. I’m gonna put this back by the way of 200 to keep it nice and honest. So I’m back to a two-line distribution again. So I apologize to the non-accountants in the room, but this is important from the financial aspect of this, to see how this product works. So I’ve got now 200 to 200. But you notice I have this allocation template capability here. You can create allocation templates and just by the very definition of allocation, it means I can take this particular dollar amount, $20,000 in this case, and I can spread it across all 350 of the Grand Restaurant locations or just 100 of them, or just a couple of them or just one of them, it doesn’t matter. But here’s an example. I’m gonna add this template and we’re gonna go look at what it means.

Now, let’s go back and look at the posting preview. Not a two-line distribution, not a four-line distribution. Oh, look at that, now a 20-line distribution. So as we’re looking at this, when I created this allocation template, I said, “I wanna go through Company 05,” so six companies, “and I wanna allocate this across a few departments as well.” So admin in production department, all right? That’s great. Notice due to, due from, due to, due from, due to, due from, all the way down, 100% balanced, 100% in sync, 100% not necessary for the user to go look at it. It’s just done and it’s accurate, but an auditor can come in here and see 100% of the transaction in behind this single invoice, whether it be purchases we’re looking at now or sales or a journal entry, it doesn’t matter.

It’s all gonna be balanced 100% of the time in behind the individual transaction. So hopefully you’re getting an idea as why we don’t have to have multiple BC companies because this little company called on the header, that’s telling me where this transaction needs to go. I don’t need to log out and log in Company 200 or Restaurant 200. I can just simply stay right here and be done with that. So for all the employees or all the AP people or receivables, people from Grand Restaurants, whatever companies you assign them is not gonna greatly increase their workload. They can access them all right here in this single window.

So that gives you an idea hopefully as to how this will work, as far as accessing your different restaurants. And by the way, it could be another vertical, it could be [inaudible 00:27:47] or anything, but you get the idea, any particular company that you give me access to in Business Central with MEM, I can work at it right from here.

Now, what about paying the bills? I do have to do that from time to time. So let’s look at a payment journal. So I look at my journal, again, standard BC, except I got this dimension value in the header. But again, that’s still standard Business Central because it’s just a dimension value. But now with MEM, this tells me what bank accounts I can access. This tells me what company the voucher belongs to and there’s nothing here right now. So let’s bring something in, let’s prepare a batch.

I’m gonna leave all the defaults here, but I do wanna explain if you notice this, company if I want to, I can filter by whatever companies I have access to. So I can shift, click control, click, and I can pick zero and three or zero and three and five or six, whatever I want. If I’m even blank, it means I wanna pay the invoices from all my restaurants right here, right now from head office. All right. So because we’re gonna use a bank account in Auto AGL, we’ll say bank account. And now I have access to all the accounts that head office has access to. So let’s pick my default bank account for Company 0. There we go. So what have I done? I got all the different filters and what range I want and all that kind of stuff. If you notice my decentralized button is turned off. It’s grayed out.

As a user, I can’t change it. That’s administrative function, but I’m doing centralized banking, is what it was telling me. And I picked the bank account. So let’s say, okay. It’s gonna go through and process all the information I need. If there’s an error, it might tell me there might be a particular account number. Yeah, I gotta go investigate that. That’s okay. We’ll ignore that for now. Ah, look at the far left, invoice belongs to Company 0, Company 5, Company 6, Company 2, and so on and so forth.

Look at my bank account, Company 0 all the way down. So if I was to post this what’s gonna happen? There’d be a single batch for bank account 00, but there would be a list do to do from every single time I paid a bill or belonged to another company, another restaurant every single time. So think of it from the user perspective. I’m the AP clerk, I’ve been told to pay the bills for all 350 restaurants and we’re gonna do centralized. I can come in here. I can do the batch just like you saw. Might be pages long. So all gonna be bank account from head office, it’s all gonna pay the bills from all the restaurants, all the invoices, pardon me for all the restaurants and way I go. Simple as that, I’m done. It’s over with. There’s nothing else for me to worry about.

So hopefully you can see the power of multi-entity with Business Central from the user perspective, greatly reduces the amount of work I have to do. So what if I have been told, “You know what? Management has decided to do decentralized payables. We’re gonna have everybody pay their own bills. Every restaurant has its own bank account, and every restaurant’s gonna pay its own bills,” and I’m the AP clerk, oh, [inaudible 00:31:00]. Well, not necessarily so. I would’ve come in here because decentralized would’ve already been checked. I would’ve run my batch. I wouldn’t have picked the bank account because who knows? I don’t know.

And it would’ve said, Company 0 it would’ve been this bank account, Company 600, 500 would’ve been Deutsche Bank, Company 200 would’ve been Bank CO2, Company 100 would Bank CO1, and so on and so forth. You get the idea? No extra work for me as the AP clerk. I just run the batch. If I post the batch as decentralized, all the due to/due froms will automatically be calculated. I’ll have a batch per bank account. I’m done, away I go, standard BC after that. If I do centralized, like I did here, one batch, this bank account, all of the appropriate due to/due froms. Decentralized, there are no due to/due froms, centralized there’ll be due to/due froms every time I pay a bill that belongs to some other company other than head office.

So the restaurants can pay their own bills or not. Maybe I do that in head office. So keep that in mind. Whoop, sorry. I was gonna manage that with only, without selecting more. So keep the power of that in mind, we haven’t created any extra work and yet whether it be 350 Grand Restaurants, 1,500 Grand Restaurants, I don’t need to add staff to go ahead and pay the bills for them all.

I can just have that same person run the batch regardless of the size of it, regardless of how many locations we have, it is no extra work for the AP clerk. So think of that, from anybody who’s got responsibility of doing transactions, they can transact in one window to any company they have access to. They do not ever have to come up here to [inaudible 00:32:40], go ahead and say, “You know what? I’m working, not in CRONUS Canada today, but I’m working on one of these other 350 companies in this line.” Go to the transactions there, come back, work in another company. No, you just work right here in all the companies that you have access to.

So that gets us down, we have about 5 minutes or 10 minutes left, with taking a look at what’s going to happen when I gather all this information together. What’s it gonna look like? What can I do? So I showed you a purchase invoice. I could have showed you a general journal. I could have showed you a job. I could have shown you a sales invoice, all of that. But I do wanna go to sales invoices for a minute, because I want to show you another functionality that you might find extremely powerful. If I look at the sales invoices and let’s look at post-it sales invoices, just to show you this. When I look at post-it sales invoices, you’ll notice that I have a company dimension value over here, again, BC standard dimension value, but we now know that we’ve picked that to be my company identifier.

So you’ll notice I’ve got invoices from 100, from 100. And if I scroll down far enough I get 200. But what if I’m looking for a particular invoice and I’ve got 350 BC companies?

Oh, Crom, I hope I know the company or the restaurant I’m referring to, but what if all I have is a document number? Let’s say it’s 10381 something or other and it was restaurant 100. Oh, there it is. Oh, there it is. Okay. It’s this one here, pop up this particular document and it’s going to give me the post-it sales invoice preview, Restaurant 100, Restaurant 100. So I know there’s no due to/due froms here and the way I go, it’s done, that’s it. I did not have [inaudible 00:34:27]. I just simply put my document number in and away I went.

From an accounting perspective, what I find very powerful about this is it a standard Business Central. I’m not reinventing the wheel. BC looks at that company code as just a dimension value. MEM is the one that’s putting security on there. BC gives you everything that you’ve asked for as long as it coincides with the security.

One final thing in here, just to give you a feel. If I was to look at my chart of accounts, then I’m gonna take a look at a couple of reports for you and we’ll go from there. Look at my chart of accounts. You’ll notice in BC, it’s very simple, single segment. So we’ve got MEM in here and we’ve got a single chart of accounts. Well, how do we keep track of everything? Well, let’s look at my vendor file for my domestic vendors. I’ve got a lot of activity in there. There’s my standard card. Nothing unusual there. I’m gonna go ahead and I wanna look at my account ledgers. Let’ look at all my ledger entries for this particular account number. Look at 100, 0, 200, 400, whatever’s in here.

Won’t be 900, by the way, because I don’t have access to 900, but you’ll notice that it’s all the same account number, 22300. So it’s almost as if MEM says, “This account number is actually 100-22300, 000-22300.” So it keeps all the balance sheet and the P&L, all the transactions separated by the particular restaurant that applies to it. Now that’s kind of busy. I could dump it out to Excel, but what if I want to take another look at it from a different perspective?

So let’s back out of here. Let’s go back to the actual card itself and take a look what it gives me. So when I look at the card itself, let’s see my boss comes in and says, “Don, we want you to take a look.” I think I went out. Let’s just go back in. “We want you to take a look and what’s in this account,” say, “for Restaurant 100,” in other words, head office. “We wanna see what head office has.” Okay, great, balance, jail balance by dimension. Now, if I stop right here for a second, understand that dimension is a standard BC function again. So this is a standard BC tool that I’m using here. And when I open it up, it’s gonna give me the ability to filter by the company i.e. global dimension one, so 000. So if I look at the matrix, in other words, all the data that’s in here, I got 600,000. I can put my line.

I filtered this by value 000. So all I’ve got, all I’ve got is the transactions from head office, Grand Restaurant 000, and that’s it. Same account number all the way down, same restaurant number all the way down. Very, very powerful from that aspect of it. So keep that in mind, you’ve got access and filtering capabilities for every account number that you have, even though it’s a standard single account structure, but MEM will keep track of every transaction, what company created it, if there was any expenses shared or any revenue shared, it will track all of that on your behalf. So what does it mean at the end of the day as far as reporting is concerned? Let’s take just a couple of minutes and let’s go back and take a look at that before I turn it back to Khaled.

So when I get to the reporting aspect of this, we use standard out-of-the-box built-in multi-entity, pardon me, the built-in Business Central reports that we’re going to modify them so they respect the security that you’ve set up with multi-entity management. So I’ll just type MEM. So it says here, I got 50 reports. That’s a fib. I’ve got more like 400, but this is 50 per page. So I’ve got these reports. You notice the jobs module, services module, the resources for manufacturing typically, and so on and so forth. I’ve got all built-in standard Business Central SQL server style reports that we had modified, removed the BC reports, left you with the MEM reports with the appropriate level of security in place. That’s wonderful.

So let’s take a little more of a filter here, MEM income, income statement, income statement by entity. So without opening this up, what’s it telling me? If I want it consolidated for any number of the restaurants that I choose, I can go select them and I can get a consolidated financial. But what if I want all 350 by restaurants and I want to get a per restaurant financial report? I would click this and away I would go, and I’d get a per restaurant financial report. Pretty powerful when you think about that, all right? And what I type in this date and I say, preview list, this is all standard BC. You notice I’ve gotten, excuse me for the layout. That’s my own demo environment, but there’s Restaurant 0, head office. And there’s its income statement. There is Restaurant 100 and its income statement, Location 125 and its income statement and so on and so on and so on.

Once again, from a user perspective, all I need to know is, “Hey, what restaurants do you wanna financial for? Hey, I’m done, one window.” And this could go to Excel, PDF Word document, or what I like a report schedule using the built-in Business Central job queue. Very, very powerful from that aspect of it. And just to give you one final feel for what MEM enables you to do as far as data management, let’s look at my MEM vendor reports. It says I got 21. That’s a lot of vendor reports, 1099 reports, and so on. Second from the bottom, the penultimate report detail trial balance by entity. Let’s look at that. This is a great visual from my perspective. So I’m gonna say 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 0, 2, 2, it lets me… Again, I can send it to PDF and so on and so forth, but I’m gonna preview it. So as of end of the year, I know it’s a little bit in the future, but let’s see what it tells me.

Restaurant 000, Grand restaurant head office, Fabrikam, vendor number 10,000, $17,000, Restaurant 95, 10,000, Fabrikam, 108,000, Restaurant number… What is it, 12 or 125 actually, it’s a little fold over there. Again, Fabrikam, vendor 10,000, 34,000. So you get the idea. Because you’re identifying each and every transaction with them, it’s no problem for them to keep track of what the balance sheet should look like, the vendor aging should look like, what the customer aging should look like. It’s gonna keep track of all that information for you, and allow you to make sure you get proper financial reports, whether it be income statement trial balance, vendor trial balance, customer record.

Whatever you need, it’s going to make sure that it’s accurate and in harmony with the information that you put into the system. Always gonna be in balance. Always gonna add up to exactly the right amount of dollars as the consolidate would give you, but you’ve got now control one user on the AP side can do all the work. One user on the AR side can do all the work and that’s an oversimplification, but you get the idea. You can stop people from wasting your time moving from install to install or BC client to BC client. They can just simply work in one environment like you’re seeing right in front of you [inaudible 00:42:00].

So guys at a very high level, I’ve left, hopefully, 10 or 15 minutes for any kind of questions or thoughts. That’s MME. It isn’t much more complicated than what you’ve seen. So don’t imagine in the back of your mind, “Oh my God, there’s gonna be all sorts of things in behind the scenes that makes this very, very difficult.” There isn’t. MEM is a very logical product that’s been around for 20 some years.

It started off in the GP world. As soon as BC was born in its infancy, we brought it over here and it’s been extremely well received by many, many clients worldwide already. So that’s it. I will pass off the sharing to somebody else and I’m good to go.

Khaled: Thank you, Don. What a great demo. You can share the screen to me.

Don: Okay. I’m gonna stop sharing, give to you. Hold on there. It’s coming. It’s coming right there. And I’ll say yes, [inaudible 00:43:00] user.

Khaled: Awesome. Thank you so much. Great. Hopefully, everyone benefited from seeing MEM in the environment. I know it’s very challenging to see everything that it has. I wish we could have you Don for five hours just to show everything, but I know that it’s very applicable and like the ideas that MEM has are genuinely simple. It’s just something that is very intuitive to business, but what’s great is that it’s so comprehensive, but not at all complicated. So let me go into bit of a discussion here about the localizations that we have for MEM. Of course, we want to make sure that it is available in as many countries as possible.

So if you do have corporations or different branches across the world, we can support multiple different countries and we do have intercompany bridge coming up, which will allow us to do a lot of what you saw in multi-entity management, in conjunction with managing multiple fiscal year ends and multiple functional currencies. So definitely stay tuned for that.

MEM is also a solution that is very integration happy. Like you’ve seen from the demo, it is so intrinsic to every part of your ERP and becomes part and parcel of Business Central. So it is really important for us to make sure that it integrates with other solutions that it continues to empower your team.

So if there is an integration that you’re looking for that you don’t see here, odds are probably got added already by the time you talk to us, because our team’s always hard at work to make sure that any integration that is popular is being added in. But, of course, everyone is welcome to let us know, and we are always happy to integrate with more and more partners, and always looking forward to working with other solution providers in the Dynamics 365 Business Central space.

So as we look to questions, I’ll just go through this really quickly. If you do have any questions, of course, get in touch with the Encore team but you can also get in touch with us. You can visit our company website for more information. Go to our eLearning video hub. There’s a lot of awesome material there, including customer case studies, different use case videos that highlight specific areas within the solution. And we have things like product booklets, brochures, different case studies, and White Papers that are also written that you can see on the resources tab.

You’re also able to access our portal to get to the knowledge base and learn more about multi-entity management or go to AppSource to get a trial of multi-entity management. I’ll open the question pane to see if there are any questions. And if anyone is not able to join us live, and you watch the recording or you forward this over, again, you’re welcome to ask us the questions later. I don’t think that I’m seeing any questions right now, so I’ll hand it over to the Encore team to wrap it up.

Sherry: Okay, great. Thank you, Don and Khaled. That was fantastic. I really enjoyed the presentation and, yeah, MEM is a very popular add-on for our customers and in the Microsoft BC, as well as GP world. So thank you for your time. Enjoyed it, and I will conclude today’s presentation now. Thank you.

Don: You’re welcome.

Khaled: Thank you so much.