When employees work as consultants for a company different from their primary employer, tracking their time and costs is crucial for both companies. The multi-company project reporting functionality allows employees to report once in their own company, which then updates the reporting for the company where they are working. This is much easier than registering time and costs in both companies separately. This functionality supports both project cost and time reporting.
The employee’s primary employer is referred to as the Employee Company or Supplier Company, and the company they are consulting for is the Customer Company. Initially, the relevant activities for the project from both companies should be linked during the setup stage. When employees report time in the Employee Company, inter-company transactions are created in the Customer Company project. Approvals of these transactions in the Customer Company are updated back to the Employee Company transaction. Direct costs in the Employee Company transaction determine the revenue of the Customer Company transaction. Vouchers can be created for inter-company liabilities in both companies using this functionality.
You can select a revenue method for the multi-company project reporting transactions to determine whether invoices should be created for the Employee Company transactions.
If employees do not have any employment registered in the Customer
Company, it is possible to create employees automatically based on the setup
data for the Customer Company and the company details. If there is an existing
master employment for the employee in the Customer Company, that information
will be used instead of creating new employees. Project access is handled in
the standard way, meaning employees for the reporting user should have access
to both the Customer Company and Employee Company projects.
To use the Multi-Company Project Reporting functionality, links between the Customer Company Activity and Employee Company Activity need to be set up. This can be done in two ways:
Existing customer already using Multi-Company Project Reporting can choose to continue using Multi-Company Project Reporting Activity Link Setup or decide to start using Multi-Company Project Reporting Rule Setup instead.
The purpose with the two ways of creating connections between the Customer Company and the Employee Company are the same but Multi-Company Project Reporting Rule Setup is more flexible and efficient to use and maintain.
Default customer activities cannot be specified for a given Employee Company, activity, or report code when using the Rule Setup. During expense reporting, if the customer activity contains multiple cost type report codes, the application expects a customer activity report code similar to the given employee activity report code. If not, it fetches a random cost report code connected to the customer activity.
Customer Project and Employee Project fields related to Multi-Company
Project Reporting will list all the projects accessible to the user,
regardless of the rule setup in the Multi-Company Project Reporting Rule
Setup page. This is to improve performance.
This information is for customers upgrading from IFS Enterprise Explorer to IFS Cloud.
After the upgrade, decide whether to use the new rule-based setup or the activity link information page and set the object property (ENABLE_MCPR_RULES) accordingly.