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.

To answer your question - 2 levels are what I am needing.

I am the treasurer for a property owners association that has 350 parcels of land, owned by 280 owners. Some owners own multiple parcels, 85% of the owners own a single parcel.

I have inherited a quickbooks accounting system that I want to migrate out of into something opensource.

The parcels of land are managed as "jobs" belonging to "customers" in quickbooks terminology. This hierarchical parent/child relationship needs to be maintained. The parcels are constantly being bought and sold to new owners. Multiple parcel owners will sometimes sell off a parcel, but retain ownership of their other parcels. Sometimes single parcel owners will buy another parcel. To handle this we need to "inactivate" the parcel being sold in the sellers inventory (this retains the financial transactions involved with that parcel being linked to that owner), then we recreate that parcels parameters into a new parcel under the new owner (that allows transactions to then apply to the new owner going forward). The parcel number remains the same, but a sequence number connected to it is advanced - no data is lost or orphaned that way.

Hopefully that will help you understand what I am needing.