(AF-5) Working with Multiple Businesses
As with any business, at the end of a year you need to create accounts to show your profits, and potentially pay some taxes on those.
There could be a variety of reasons why you actually perform this action through more than one legal business entity. It could be that some of your work is done in co-operation with a colleague and you account for that revenue through a business set up with them. Maybe you have two brands and account for each brand through a different business. Maybe you are transitioning from one business entity to another and need to keep track of what revenue went through which business.
In Workshop Angel, you can define multiple businesses, in a similar way to how we discussed defining multiple brands in the last lesson. With those business definitions, you can direct your clients to pay their money into different business accounts, and search for invoice and payments totals by business.
Here is how it works...
How to Define a New Business
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A new business and a new brand are created.
The way Workshop Angel works, every business has at least one brand, hence the creation of the new brand too. The second business may operate under the same brand as the first, or it may use a different one.
To fill in the new business's brand's details
DOES A BRAND HAVE AN INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL NAME? EXPLAIN HOW TO USE THIS...
Assigning a Business to an Activity
As we saw when we discussed brands in the last lesson, you now need to assign a specific business to each activity that you run:
Businesses, Invoices and Payments
As businesses are a finance related topic, then each invoice and payment recorded are assigned to a specific business. Here are the details of how you can work with this concept:
Invoices and Businesses
An invoice is assigned to a specific business at the time it is created.
If the invoice is for an activity, then the business of the invoice will be taken from the business of the activity.
If the invoice is a non-activity invoice, then you will have an option to assign the business at the time you create the invoice.
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Payments and Businesses
A payment will have been made into the account of a specific business.
For a card payment, the business is recorded in the payment item automatically when the payment is taken. If it is at the time of booking, then the business is taken from the activity. If it is for the payment of an invoice via the link supplied in the payment reminder type emails, then it will take the business from the business assigned to the invoice.
Allocation and Businesses
As a payment and an invoice both contain business information, then the app is designed so that allocation of a payment can only take place to an invoice assigned to the same business.
Changing The Business of an Activity, Invoice or Payment
There are some strict rules governing what you can do to change the business, designed to maintain the integrity of the accounting information.
Changing the Business of an Activity
This you can do with no problem. The bookings and payments made before you changed the business will remain with Business 1, and the new bookings and their associated payments made after that will be with Business 2.
If an attendee booked and made a deposit payment with Business 1, then subsequent payments they make towards that booking/invoice will also be assigned to Business 1.
Changing the Business of an Invoice
You can only change the business of an invoice when you have removed all of the allocations to that invoice from related payments. This is because those payments have been made into accounts assigned to the old business.
Once changed, you then need to assign payments made to the new business in order to end up with the invoice being marked as fully paid.
IS THIS TRUE?
Changing the Business of a Payment
You cannot change the business of a payment, as it is recorded as having been paid into an account of the business the payment item is assigned to.
If you entered the business in error, you will need to
Remove any allocations from the payment
Delete the payment
Re-create the payment with the correct business
Re-allocate the payment to appropriate invoices
Details of how to perform these operations can be found in lessons MF-X and MF-Y.
Reporting on Business Specific Payments and Invoices
The search functions in the Finances - Invoices & Payments area will have an extra search box for Business once you have created a new business.
You can use the search function to report on business specific totals for invoices and payments.
In future releases of the app we will add more comprehensive reporting capablities on a per business and per brand basis.
Working with Two Brand That Are The Same
If you operate two separate business entities but use the same brand for each, then you need to be aware that you will have to different brands defined in the app, and to take this into account when working with your contacts.
This only really becomes an issue if you have one brand associated with both businesses, and another brand defined too. In this case, in order to do a contact search by brand you may need to search first for the brand associated with Business 1, and then for the same brand name associated with Business 2.
Summary
We have looked at how you can create different businesses within Workshop Angel, to represent the situation where your overall revenue is recorded through more than one legal business entity.
We've looked at how to create the second business, and how to assign that business to an activity. We then looked at how the specific business becomes associated with a particular invoice or payment, and how you can make changes to those assignments.
Phew! That is quite a deep and detailed topic. We hope that all makes sense, and of course, if you have any questions, please contact us via the community forum!
Our next topic in the Additional Features chapter is about how to manage number limited pricing options.
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