Hi Wibke,
unfortunately, this is not really supported in NAV. One could suggest to use dimenions for the separation, but this won't really work in all circumstances and it's quite a PITA to make it work.
In other sotware, the facility would amount to a company code or a plant. You could set up the accounting to have a balance by company code and by plant. In NAV, one company is one entity... balance checking is only implemented company-wide.
We have implemented accounting by facility (Permanent Establishment, PE), it is quite a change from standard NAV, though. With this you would get:
- Balance by PE - all postings must equal to zero by date and PE. This is checked and enforced.
- Assignment of Bank Accounts and Assets (G/L Accounts would be useful) to PEs. This results in a split-up of yur balance sheet by PE.
- Arbitration facility (show the build- up of Debt/Credit between the PEs on a separate account). This is needed for any mixed-PE postings, for example payment of an invoice from a bank account belonging to a different PE.
- Reporting in the G/L, Customers, Vendors, Account Schedule by PE.
- "Local" Chart of Accounts for a PE. Technically the PE can post with their own account numbers (mandatory in the country) to the accounts of the whole company, which have the Chart of Accounts of the main company. This has its limitations, though. You need a direct link for all "indirect" postings via posting groups and setups, or a 1:1 relation from PE Account to G/L Account.
- Ownership of inventory can be separated with locations. PE must be part of the ILEs, though, with quite some interesting (but resolvable, IMO) issues regarding ACIE. We didn't implement this because it was not needed for our use case.
Overall, it is quite an effort to implement this, worthy of an Add-On. But it is not very often a viable use case, because it's adding complexity to the application.
The "standard" way to solve this would be to use several companies. but this is also like opening a whole can of worms: Master Data Management, Consolidation and the reporting time-lag, Intercompany Transactions (but for facilities or PEs, they technically aren't intercompany from a consolidation perspective), and so on. Maybe adding the PE complexity is the better solution then.
with best regards
Jens
