Create a legal entity
This module discusses how to create a legal entity and prepare it for financial management, which is the first phase of the implementation.
A legal entity is an organization that has a registered or legislated legal structure. Legal entities can enter into legal contracts and are required to prepare statements that report on their performance. The country or region that you select for the primary address of the legal entity controls the country and region-specific features that are available for the legal entity.
Before choosing the country/region for the new legal entity, you need to understand the significance of the localization in finance and operations apps.
Some regulatory requirements of certain countries/regions require that finance and operations apps enables or disables certain functionality and features and even forms, fields, reports, and inquiries.
A company is a type of legal entity.
In finance and operations apps, companies are the only kind of legal entity that you can create, and every legal entity is associated with a Company ID.
The Company ID field is limited to four alphanumeric characters, and once it is created it cannot be changed. Proper planning for a naming convention should be considered prior to creation of legal entities in the production environment. Users can access data only for the company that they are currently signed in to and have security access for the roles they belong to.
A search name is an alternate name that can be used to search for this legal entity. One of the best ways to learn about finance and operations apps and be able to successfully implement it, is by listening to the story of a customer’s day-to-day operations. You need to be able to gather and convert the customer requirements into test cases and try to match the functionality and configuration of finance and operations apps with the customer’s business processes.
Example
The company Contoso is an organization that has at least one company or legal entity and has registered its international companies in multiple countries such as Germany, United States, and France.
Therefore, Contoso is an organization that is a group of people who are working together to carry out a business process or achieve a goal. Organizational hierarchies represent the relationships between the organizations that make up your business. This organization has decided to acquire a business, with a fictitious name, Adventure Works Cycles. You can create a new legal entity by navigating to the Legal entities page.
Watch this video to learn how to create a new legal entity.
Registration IDs
Many countries and regions have different regulations and requirements for recording registration numbers or IDs.
All countries/regions have their requirements for supporting various country-specific functionalities related to registration numbers provided by different state offices. Examples of registration numbers include, social security number (SSN), tax identification number (TIN), and European VAT identification (EU VAT ID). This feature provides unified framework for all countries in all regions taking into account country-specific requirements of some European countries.
The Registration category is a country/region registration identifier approved for use in a country/region for tax, customs, and other purposes.
After you create the legal entity, the next step is to configure number sequences for the newly created company.