Hi John,

On Fri, Apr 28, 2023 at 5:34 PM John Brooks <john@day-light.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 11:46 PM <john@day-light.com> wrote:
>> Can LedgerSMB handle Parent Customers with multiple properties where invoicing is done per property and accounted for separately from the other properties. Payments are made by the parent customer for all the properties they own?

LedgerSMB has a concept called "credit entity account" (ECA). Invoices are made out to an ECA. You can have multiple ECAs per business counterpart. So, if you're doing business with Wallmart, you can have a separate credit entity account for each Wallmart branch. In the AR Outstanding report, you can select on all open invoices from Wallmart to send a summary to a central contact at Wallmart, if you need. The AR Aging report even provides an e-mail interface to send that e-mail directly from within the web application.

 

> Would suggest an easy solution - - - -trying to keep things very clean
> and simple - - - - AIUI the goal in record keeping anyway.
>
> 1. invoice per property
> 2. generate an 'invoice' of the invoices'
> done

@o1bigtenor: do you do this yourself? Do you use LedgerSMB for it? I'm trying to imagine how to do this with existing LedgerSMB functionality, but I can't come up with the solution. I hope this is an opportunity to learn!

 

> It is necessary to have information flow back to the 1st level of
> invoice - - - ie when the master invoice is paid
> that all the subsidiary invoices are also so marked. If that doesn't
> happen - - - well then you will have a mess
> trying to determine your accounts aging.

 

[ snip ]

 

I guess what I'm asking is can LedgerSMB support hierarchical customers
with subordinate entities under them.
Like where a General Contractor has corporate Clients with multiple
branch locations that have to be tracked separately for each contracted job.
I realize that I may not be explaining my question very well of how are
nested entities handled.

There's currently no nesting deeper than the "Legal entity" > "entity credit account" nesting. How deep would you like your setup to nest? I'm familiar (in a different context) with different "levels" of parents, without modelling the entire ownership tree: "Immediate parent", "Ultimate Legal Parent" and "Ultimate Economic Parent". If you need more than the currently available 2 levels, would these 3 levels be sufficient?

Regards,

--

Bye,

Erik.

http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP.

Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.

Erik,

After going over what you have explained above and looking into some of the documentation on the website it looks like the "Legal entity" > "entity credit account" nesting. is exactly what I am after, a single parent entity with multiple children entities. I think the best way forward is to set up a testing environment and run some sample data through to determine if it meets our needs.

Is there enough similarity between version 1.5 as offered by "efficito.com" and version 1.10 that was just released to get a realistic understanding of how the software functions? FreeBSD's port system only offers version 1.2.26 so it will require a manual install to get to version 1.10.

John

@o1bigtenor: thanks for suggesting an easy solution to keep things very clean and simple...