t is becoming increasingly common for our clients to run multiple companies within their NAV systems either for multiple trading entities or just for tax efficiency. This adds a level of complication to the Dynamics NAV configuration.

NAV is well structured to handle multiple companies. There is no licensing limit to the number of companies you can run in your NAV database, and there are Inter-Company and Consolidation modules to support the transfer of data between companies. This is the standard, ‘out of the box’, way to handle this situation and offers numerous benefits to your business.

However, what if your entities share customers, vendors, inventory, and warehouse space? What if the only difference between your trading companies is a brand presence, or a bank account? The standard NAV process then requires you to configure a separate company, and setup a new chart of accounts, duplicate your master data – customers, vendors, items, locations etc., and then continue to maintain this data between companies.

Over the past 12 months, we have encountered this situation on numerous occasions. Following a detailed review of the intricacies in managing this structure, we have designed and developed our latest Fenwick Gold Module – Multiple Entity Operations, or ‘MEO’.

The MEO module allows you to setup a single NAV company, and manage multiple entities within it. It introduces the concept of an ‘Entity Card’, and allows unlimited entities to be setup within the NAV company. Against each entity you can record all the information you would against your trading company – Name, Address, ABN, Logo, etc., and then attach each entity to every transaction processed through NAV.

Dynamics NAV will then manage the data to ensure that it is consistent for each entity. It will:

  • Ensure all transactions balance by entity
  • Automatically post balancing lines when documents are processed against more than one entity
  • Process your BAS separately for each entity
  • Group Vendor Payment processing by Entity (even if you have invoices owing to the one vendor from several entities)
  • Default Entity by Warehouse Location
  • ‘Sell’ inventory between entities when it is transferred between different entity owned warehouses
  • Print Customer Statements grouped by Entity
  • Print all documents with Entity Specific stationery
  • Reporting by Entity

This functionality greatly reduces overhead in managing data within NAV, and allows you to spend more time on improving your operations, rather than forever reconciling data between systems.