Splitting Company to Multiple Companies

navhero

Not very easiest of tasks I know ](*,) . The request is to split one company to several companies based on value of Global Dimension 1 and make database look like it had all companies from the start. There are not that many posted ledger entries, but it would still be nice to have as least as possible manual work involved.

My question is about least painful way to achieve this...some general guidelines. What to do, what not to do, and generally how to approach this task.


I found this topic, but i hope someone worked on similar problem and has much more experience.

http://www.mibuso.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=8104


Any help or advice is appreciated

Fisherman

We started trying it, and found a tool on Mibuso that helped us out, though I can't remember what it was now. It wasn't explicitly for this - it was more meant to move information between databases, but we were able to make it work for our needs.

We weren't able to do it, though, because each of the divisions that we wanted to represent as companies doesn't handle their own accounting. It's a traditional US setup that accounting is centralized, while the divisions manage their own sales and purchases. We never found a way to make that work and had to abandon it. I don't know why NAV doesn't offer some sort of corporate entity structure in their consolidation infrastructure to support this, but just a heads up.

DenSter

There's responsibility center in standard NAV, and there is also consolidation functionality in standard NAV. Splitting an existing company is not part of standard NAV. I don't think you can fault a software company for not putting this functionality into an ERP product.

Fisherman

Oh -

Don't get me wrong. I'm not faulting them for not supporting us trying to split an existing company. That was our bad.

I do fault them for not supporting a business infrastructure that's fairly common across the U.S. (buying and selling in remote divisions, but transferring the payables and receivables to a central, corporate location). That's how we operate, and I know of many other companies that do as well. It's simply not supported by NAV without doing a lot of extra customization. We found out how to consolidate the G/L for financial statements, but not how to actually move the payables/receivables so that checks can be cut and cash receipts posted centrally.

davmac1

I had to split one company into 4 as part of an upgrade/rewrite and data conversion.
I used the department (global dimension 1) to determine which data went to which company.

You need a reliable method for determining how to split up financial data.

Savatage

Not that I know anything about company creation

matttrax

Yes, I have also done this, but for two companies instead of four.

Here's what we did:

1) Make a copy of the existing company with the new company name. There are several ways you can do this. Backup the company, rename the company in NAV, then restore the backup. There's also a utility to transfer information between companies you can download here.

2) Block or delete the dimensions from each company. This will prevent new things from being posted with wrong dimensions before you've had a chance to delete them.

3) Write a utility to go through your dimension tables (Ledger Entry Dimension, Journal Line Dimension, Posted Document Dimension, etc). Grab the records those entries refer to and delete them.

4) Restore that backup from step 1 one more time into a new database this time. Compare the balance from this backup to the sum of the balances in each of the other companies for the G/L, Customer Ledg, Vendor Ledg, etc. They should match. If not something got deleted that shouldn't have.

It's a lot of work and should probably be done over a weekend, but with proper preparation and testing, it's really not so bad. Hope that helps.

jreynolds

Be careful with the item ledger (and related tables - value entry, item application, item entry relation, etc.). You must make certain that the dimension(s) that you are using to split the companies are assigned based on item number. This is because the process that applies one item ledger entry to another does not look at dimensions. You need to pay extra attention if you are using manufacturing or BOM journals as these provide yet an additional way for item ledger entries to be linked together that do not respect dimensions.

You also need to make certain that posted documents can stay together; that is, that the header and all lines will stay with the same company.

navhero

Thanks you all for your answers and ideas. Helpful tips and warnings
We are analyzing the data at the moment. There are like 10 thousand posted documents so not very much really..and there are no items (and ILEs and VEs). Dimension seems to be used correctly.

Now I am thinking about a way to make all new companies look like there are used from 01.01.2009. So, to transfer the beginning balances and all documents posted after 01.01.2009.
Seems to me like there are two options:
1) Copy all data to each of the seven companies and delete everything not related to each company (based on the dimension values) as matttrax described . On the downside, there will be issues like: changing Entry numbers, changing Document numbers to avoid gaps in No. series (as asked to do) and so on.

2) What do you think about this possibility. To treat the situation as migration to Navision from any other system and thus avoid need to change data afterwards. In order to do so, I will have to recreate some posted documents and postings through general journal based on ledger entries. Have you tried something like this?:). Its of cource doable, but how hard?

Or any other ideas..i am pretty much a newbie to Navision so its quite possible I havent think of something easier. As usual..no perfect solution

navhero

Just a quick reply on how this was solved, if someone needs.

We ended up by creating new beginning balances for all companies and then copying all transactions posted after 010109 directly to tables. It involved renumeration of Entry Nos, Document Nos and other stuff and also mapping data in new companies to data in old company, so the references (especially, for information about applied entries, DCLE, DVLE and so on) would be correct. Unneeded Master data was deleted, and finally No. Series reseted to latest values used in each company.

Cheers

ajhvdb

Want to share your code? I can think of some shortcuts you needed to make.