Business entity

Use this page to manage business entities. A business entity is a customer and/or a supplier or a site.

You enter basic details for the companies you trade with, including their trading addresses and known contacts. From these details you can create new customers, suppliers and sites.

For each business entity, you can specify a parent business entity. This feature is particularly useful if you do business with subsidiaries or divisions of the same organisation and want to track their contact and billing information separately from the main business entity.

Prerequisites

Create a business entity

You can automatically create a business entity from the Customer, Supplier and Site pages.

You can also create a business entity with this page to attach to a customer, a supplier or to a site.

If you are integrating with Sage Intacct

When setting up business entities from Sage Intacct, you need to create a separate company and financial site because there isn't a 1-to-1 correlation. The company and financial site need to have the same Entity ID from Sage Intacct.

Sage Distribution and Manufacturing Operations provides the source data for all customers and suppliers. Go to the Customer or the Supplier page and attach the business entity record to the customer or the supplier record. All data defined in this page is sent to Sage Intacct.

Enter general information

  1. Select Create. All new business entities are active by default.
  2. On the General tab, enter required information such as name, ID, country, currency, legal entity and tax ID.
To display the role of the business entity in the Roles block, you must attach the business entity to a customer, a supplier, or to a site. The role is updated automatically.

Enter the address

You need at least 1 address for a business entity but you can define as many addresses as needed. If there is only 1 address, it is the primary address for all addresses. The primary addresses are used by default on other documents.

Each address can have several contacts. If there is only 1, it is the primary contact by default.

  1. On the Addresses tab, select Add an address.
  2. Enter the address details in the panel that opens.
  3. The name you enter displays on documents such as orders.

  4. When you select the country, other fields localise to your selection but you do not need to re-enter information.

    You're entering a French address, but you see Province instead of Department.

    You can enter the French department name and when you select France, the field displays Department. Entered data is not lost.

Enter contacts

  1. From the Contacts tab, select Add contact. Or on the Addresses tab, from the More actions menu in the address block for an existing address, select Add a contact.
  2. In the panel that opens, you can add a contact, though this is not required.
  3. If you enter more than 1 contact for an address, you can select 1 of them to be the primary. A single contact is the primary by default.
  4. Select OK. This closes the panel but does not save your data to the business entity record.
Before leaving the business entity record, remember to save all changes.

Edit a business entity

You can edit business entity records. The primary address must be active. If you want to deactivate this address, first you must define another active address as the primary address.

If you are integrating with Sage Intacct

Sage Distribution and Manufacturing Operations provides the source data for all customers and suppliers. Edit the data from Sage Distribution and Manufacturing Operations in the Customer or the Supplier page directly.

Delete or deactivate a business entity

To deactivate the business entity record, turn OFF the Active switch on the General tab.