What are some pros and cons to having a separate location as a division and not having/using the multisite license?
Welcome @dbaldwin!
Division or Location - ask accounting - this question screams of accounting and financial considerations that most operations folks never realize matter in this situation. This could also mean ‘company’ or ‘warehouse’ or ‘site’. All of these things are very different in Epicor and have their own process considerations.
Generally, if this (location/division) is a separate legal entity, then General Accounting (GAP) rules usually apply, and you must treat everything with an arm’s length transaction. If the division is overseas, operates in a different currency, etc. then accounting may want/need it to be completely separate inside ERP - there are so many reasons why it must be separate, and these reasons will tell you if it has to be a new company/site/warehouse.
If you have no legal or accounting requirements, and if the division is just a categorization of a single company, then consider that a Site is a financial separation at a transaction level. There are separate site configurations at all levels, and you cannot interact across sites without doing transactions (inventory moves, etc.). You may just want a few more Warehouses…
More than one Site in a Company needs the multi-site license as I understand it.
More than one company, each with one site does not need the multi-site license.
But check with your CAM to be sure.
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Thank you Mike, I should have clarified those things in my question…
It is the same legal entity. This will be for a new out of state division of the existing company adding in warehouses with additional bin locations. I feel that most importantly, the setup should be the cleanest from the financial aspect while delivering what the operations side is needing as well.
1,000% to what @MikeGross said.
We bought multi-site when adding a new site with separate P&L. We didn’t know if it would be a site or a company, but it was pretty certain that it would not be a warehouse only. (I chose site.)
I say that to say, I wish they would just let you have a temp license for multi-site in a dev database. It’s impossible to make heads or tails of this until you process your business’ day-to-day transactions in a multi-site environment.
To give you the exact opposite scenario, in January this year, we added a site that was NOT a separate division. It shares the COA with the MfgSys site. This was purely to make MRP (supply and demand) very clearly delineated between MfgSys and the other location (in another state). But financially it’s as if we did everything in the MfgSys building.
Also, some reports can only be filtered by site/company, and not by warehouse (Inv.WIP Recon, for example).
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@JasonMcD makes great points as well. I totally forgot about reporting!!
Sounds like you need a warehouse from what you’re saying. I’d check with accounting to be safe, plus I’d get the technical references for Inventory and MRP. Separate warehouses might be a financial separation, but it can affect inventory transactions and MRP drastically.
If they are siloed.
For ICPOs, etc. (a nightmare in their own right), you need multi-site in order for the companies to talk to each other.
| Scenario | If this | And this | Then this is called | And you need |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 1 company | 2 sites | Multi-site | Multi-site license |
| B | 2 companies | ICPOs | Multi-company | Multi-site license |
| C | 2 companies | No ICPOs | Normal | No special license |
I really wonder if there is any substantive advantage to scenario B over scenario C.
Ah, I know - book consolidation, right? Rolling to a parent company?
Meh - we are using 2 ERPs between here and corporate and they have to journal one to the other at month end.
So yeah, I still wonder about the merits of option B.
Hmm - did not realize that. Thanks!