How to Use Dynamics 365 Business Central to Manage Mutli-Properties in Real Estate

I want to show you how you might use Dynamics 365 Business Central to manage a multi-property real estate investment portfolio. Let’s take a look at it.

Setting Up Multiple Legal Entities

We’ll look at how you can set up multiple legal entities within Business Central. We’ll look at pertinent licensing features. We’ll look at a feature called Master Data Management that allows you to replicate data from one company to another so you can easily have multiple entities. We’ll look at intercompany transactions and we’ll look at some financial reporting, and finally we’ll discuss a little bit how you can take these things and you can use them in other industries. So let’s get started.

Role Center and Company Management

This is my Role Center for Business Central. I’m logged into a specific company. I can log into additional companies just by clicking on this icon up here, and you can see the different companies I have in my system. What’s nice about this is I can maintain separate legal entities for all my different property investments, and I may need to do that because I may have different ownership and I may just want to keep separate books on them anyways. And I can easily do that in Business Central.

Licensing Guidelines

These are the basic licensing guidelines for Dynamics 365 Business Central. You can see that you can have multiple companies in the same environment. This is the current limit of the number of companies that you can have in one environment. For Dynamics 365 Business Central, you can see that’s 300 entities and that’s a lot. There’s some other aspects of that that you may want to talk with a consultant about, but you can have up to 300 entities per environment. You can have multiple environments if you want to, and there are other options that you can use as well if you have multiple companies. So this is a big advantage for Business Central licensing. Some ERP systems require you to add additional licensing for every company that you add. This is all in a basic license fee. For Business Central, you can have up to 300 entities. This is why it makes it especially good for real estate companies.

Logging into Other Companies

Let’s log into one of my other companies. I have New Haven properties. I’ll switch right here. And what I can do in Business Central, if I have multiple companies, I can copy basic master file information from one company to another. Here you see I’ve got this enabled for this particular company. It’s looking at my basic company, Cronus USA to get the master file information. And this is a list of all the master file tables that can be copied from one company to another. And what that means is if I add a new account to my chart of accounts in my master company, all the other companies that look to that company to get information will add that new account number to their chart account as well. So this makes adding information into the system a lot easier to do.

Intercompany Transactions

Another thing that I can easily do in Business Central is create intercompany transactions. I can create payables transactions, receivables transactions, general journals, and they can be distributed to the other companies. Here’s a good example here. This is a payables invoice. It’s to one vendor. This is going to be added to the outstanding payables in my main company, but these amounts down here will be distributed to the other companies. And you can see in this transaction, I’ve got four other companies that will receive intercompany charges based on this particular invoice. This is all set up. It’s also looking at an intercompany chart of accounts. This is easy to set up as well, and you can share it among all your companies. And though we’re looking at a purchase invoice for this particular transaction, I’ve got intercompany functionality in purchase orders, sales order receivable transactions, also in general journals. And this is easy to do. It’s easy to set up and it’s easy to execute.

Financial Reporting

Let’s take a look at some basic financial reporting where I accumulate information from multiple companies into one report. One thing I’ve done in my system is I set up a holding company in that holding company have multiple companies that roll up to the holding company. I do this primarily for reporting to make the reporting a little easier. So what I can do with that is create financial reports that look at multiple companies.

Consolidating Companies

So here are the business units I’ve identified for this holding company. I’ve got those right here. I can consolidate anytime I want to. And all this is going to do is it’s going to bring transactions into the consolidating company. If I have another reporting tool or I don’t want to use a consolidated report, I can just use the reporting tools that I have to look at the individual ledgers in Business Central and get that information.

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Financial Reports

These are the current financial reports I have in my system. Let’s open up the real estate investment one. This is the standard report writer in Business Central that uses columns and rows to render the reports. Here’s an income statement here and just Scroll down here. We’ll take a look at some of the detail here. These are expense details that are in the report. You can see them listed here by account and also by company. They’ve got American distribution here, New Haven Properties, Oak Ridge Residential, and West Valley Commercial. What I can also do is drill down on a particular number and look at the detail, the transaction detail for that particular number. This is water and sewage expense. I can look at the underlying entries here. These are all the transactions for this particular report. But what I can do is I can filter down and look at a particular business unit and it’s easy to do. I’m just going to take a filter right here, look at this business unit code and look at a particular business unit. And now I’ve got the transactions just for that business unit. So this makes it easy to work with the data.

Exporting Reports

I can also export this to Excel just by going up here. I can export it to Excel here. I’m looking at the report online. I can drill down that I just showed you, but I can also print that out. I can export it to Excel. Easy to do, and here’s the report data in Excel. I can take this, I can format it, I can add graphs to it if I want to. If I add graphs, I can also export next time onto that particular template and I’ll get the same graphs without having to redo them. So this becomes a handy way to get information out of Business Central. I can share this with others easily and I can also just print the report out. Let’s take a look at that. So here’s the standard financial reporting tool used in Business Central. Looking at multiple companies. There are a number of other reporting tools that you can use with Business Central. So you can use this basic report tool that comes with Business Central or one of the other reporting tools that a lot of our clients use.

Conclusion

In this demonstration I showed you how Business Central could be used for multi-property real estate investment companies, how you can easily set up multiple entities. We looked at some licensing related to that. I also showed you how you could replicate information from a master company to all your other companies if you want to. And there are a number of intercompany transaction types that you can use your day-to-day processing. And we looked at an example of a consolidated financial statement which has information from multiple companies. So this functionality is also useful for other types of industries, specifically family offices and franchisees. If you’re looking for a system for a family office, business Central is especially good because you can have multiple legal entities, but you can also have operational type functionality in the system. So if you’re doing some distribution, you’re doing some project accounting or you’re doing some light manufacturing, you can easily do that in the same system. So this is a big advantage for family offices. Also for franchisees that have multiple locations. If you’ve got a lot of locations, maybe different franchises, it’s easy to record all of them in Business Central and get the reporting and control that you want.