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Small and medium business | Business Central, N...
Suggested Answer

When accounts consist of one entity with multiple locations

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Posted on by 390

Newbie here just getting into Dynamics.

An initial question that has come up is regarding choosing what entities to use for a specific business use case.

USE CASE
Residential service provider (security, audio/video, electrical, whatever).  The pieces that are in play are:
individual - each person of the household that is a decision maker or is communicated with in some way
household - made up of multiple individuals that are communicated with, but this can change for example by divorce
location - the key entity that stores all communications/cases/invoices/data for the business relationship with that specific "address/building/etc", but this can change for example by a move or additional purchase

With that said it seems like with Dynamics fixed structure there's not an easy way to put these together as I think about them.

Therefore I would create a household as the account and then customers in the household added to that account.  In the case of a split then the party leaving the current location would get a new account and then moved to that new account (CAN YOU MOVE CUSTOMERS BETWEEN ACCOUNTS)?

However, what is the "best" way to store a location such that all history stays with that location even up on the household(account) changing?  Would you make each location an account and then make the household the parent account? (AGAIN ALSO CAN YOU MOVE A CHILD ACCOUNT TO A NEW PARENT ACCOUNT)?

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  • JAngle Profile Picture
    133 on at

    The business central version of this that you could consider would be contacts and customers. Customers have the financial data posted against them. Contacts can move between customers or as it’s known, business relation. For tracking financials you can add dimensions to contacts. This would make analysis on the P&L easier. Customer wise you can have a Bill-to customer and that is a value which can be changed if needed too.

  • crham Profile Picture
    390 on at

    Thanks for responding.  I don't fully understand your answer though.

    First, I put this in the Business Central forum because I didn't see an option for CRM, but does it even matter?  Dynamics has Account and Contact entities regardless right?

    So you did answer that contacts can move and I'm assuming child accounts can change parents...

    ...but the key question is how to handle households, and multiple or changing locations?

    Again the only way I can think that it would work properly (but not as logical as I'd like it to be), is to use Accounts for households and then for each households residence/s create a child account to use for creating cases and invoice and storing all the history of activity around that residence.

    If there's a better way then that please elaborate.

  • Suggested answer
    JAngle Profile Picture
    133 on at

    You’re thinking about it in a CRM way. Yes, this is a BC forum so I’ll describe it in that way. Cases don’t exist so you’d need a replacement for that too. A lot of the worthwhile processes in BC have a financial aspect linked to them whereas many CRM processes will not.

    BC’s version of accounts and contacts is customers and contacts. Yes, parent and child on customers can change. It is the bill-to customer value as a parent.

    Escaping the current construct you’ve described. ERP makes use of analysis codes, referred to as Dimensions. You could therefore use a Dimension to determine the household. This is a default piece of data that can go against customers or contacts and be changed over time more movements. You can then analysis the financials by this dimension in the P&L but also with the customer accounts. With the latter you’d be able to see who was involved for what property of a course of time.

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