Managing multi country environments in Business Central public cloud
I have been asked recently by few people “Can I add my Company in ‘XYZ’ Country into my Business Central tenant?”. Let me shed a light on my understanding of current state where we are nowadays.
It used to be quite difficult to get this setup in old fashioned on-premise environments. With D365 Platform this could be literally matter of few clicks to get multi country environment up and running. Then you can install some bolts on and full automation of your data sync processes and intercompany transactions is in place.
What are the rules about adding the Company in your environment? As long as you are 51% business owner in the company, you can add the company in your environment.
So what you get as part of Business Central pay per use plan (currently £57.5 essentials; £82.8 Premium)?
You can create up to 3 environments within the subscription. But ‘Production’ type within subscription is just one. When you try to create new one, you will receive following error:
Obviously this is extra traffic for Microsoft so you need following SKU in order to get extra environment (any country):
Wow, you can literally buy it on my web shop (T&C applied) and off you go in cloud. When you create a new environment, you select which localisation that environment is for (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/compliance/apptest-countries-and-translations). So it’s literally £246 extra per country and then as per number of users in your subsidiary countries. You get language localisation and law compliant software (each country will have specifics, e.g. UK has Making Tax Digital). Your own apps can be installed in all environments (or not if you have some apps for specific country). All you will need to do is create captions translations for them during the development phase. Well, we all use google translator so not a big deal anyway.).
What then? You need to sync a data between your companies. Microsoft is doing an amazing job on adding new features in D365 platform. Nowadays topic of “master sync” can be done in Business Central 22 out of the box.
Omg how much of my time and effort this would have saved me having this available for last 10 years.
As it’s new feature and it has some flaws (software by definition will never be finished) which are summarised on the following blog: https://yzhums.com/35196/.
I really like the fact that this is part of the solution as I did something similar on one of my projects in past and it’s hell a lot of the work to make this working as a robust solution. Why would you reinvent the wheel again and again..?
The sync topic is one part of the system challenges you will face when dealing with intercompany transactions in between multiple companies/environment. You will typically want to use automation to create: Purchase Order, Sales Orders, Shipment, Invoices to avoid any duplication and save the most precious thing we all have: time.
In the intercompany area Microsoft has added some functionality recently described on me fellow BC hero blog https://yzhums.com/23754/. I’m sure Microsoft will be keep improving this part of an BC application, but as it stands it’s just not enough.
The main reason is the missing drop shipment automation. Very often people will sit on two chairs (e.g. UK staff working on Ireland company orders) the last thing you want to do on drop shipment business documents (not all intercompany transaction obviously are drop shipments) is to post them in both companies manually to lose the precious.
Obviously there are some addons on the market filling the gap. Should we have a quick look at them?
To me there are two main competitors.
Abakion (Denmark ISV)
IT. Integro Intercompany (Poland ISV)
I had an experience to implement them both recently and must say Polish It Integro is absolute winner. Main reasons:
Way more extendible design - e.g.
Abakion can synchronise only 10 fields from Sales>Purchase>Sales header line (Really? not enough).
IT.INTEGRO has configurable entity where you can add link to tables and share all data (e.g. do you fancy synchronise Purchase Line Comment with Sales Line comments on the other side?). The mapping is configurable without any limit.
IT.INTEGRO has way better structure on exchanging documents (in logic of incoming/outgoing headers and lines); Abakion using standard Incoming/Outgoing box logic - big limitations there, I think MS might reground this area one day for Drop Shipments automation logic. You kind of need header/line transactional logic allowing serial numbers/lot numbers etc.
You can setup alerts on the field level (e.g. alert me when manufacturing company changes shipment date etc.); Abakion - 250 euros an hour bespoke work
Cost - IT.INTEGRO way cheaper (prize per user - only premium and essentials counts)
Abakion 13.5 euros (obviously you can bundle and haggle..)
IT.Integro - 5 euros (unlimited 500 euros license with 100+ users; no brainer)
Support
Abakion - It is hard to explain my experience with their support team. This might be due to fact that my project was on premise (not much I could do about it) but to me Abakion is strong no go. If your process does require extras, I’d rather use company which has full documentation of extendable events available like IT.INTEGRO and InsightWorks rather than Abakion blackbox. Support we have been provided as customer was shambless. Nothing is black or white, but I would not recommend them to anybody. DYOR, Look around, compare.
Obviously you could think it’s bias as I’m IT.INTEGRO reseller, most of the big partners resells Abakion apps (I guess for a reason - is it better to share commission from 5euros or 13euros?). I’m the business owner now, but who knows me surely heard me saying this before “I’m not salesmen”. I do in best of my knowledge maximum to help my customers achieve their digital goals. This was one of the reasons why I left traditional partners. The politics, fluff. We are different.
As mentioned I believe Microsoft will fill the Drop Shipment gap one day themselves and there won’t be need for any extra subscription, but note to say that this is really complex topic when we talk about robust generic solution (serial numbers/lot numbers/reservations are what makes this all tricky to me).
Come and ask us more details if you are interested. Hope I have shared something new with you.
