We’ve got several customers that have several brands under the same company. They want their invoices to have a distinctive logo depending on the brand being used.
We’ve usually solved that with the sale_shop module or some hack but I’d like to know how others are solving this requirement.
I’m thinking that it may be interesting to have a “company.subdivision” or “company.brand”, that could be specified in sales (and invoices) and that prevented sales from different subdivisions be grouped in the same invoice.
Then, we could set the logo at this subdivision/brand model.
we solved likewise problems until now with multi-company. Several brands under one company didn’t occur to me until now. Usually there are more items to customize per brand, last not least the whole accounting stuff has to be done per brand. For me it is typical use case of multi-company.
I think we are missing a distinction within the company model. Indeed there could be two concepts for the company. The first is the one used for the accounting which ensure that all accounting entries are registered under the same chart of account. And the second is the one under which operations like sale, purchase etc. are done. The last one is of course linked to a unique accounting company.
I’m not sure how we could make evolve the current design to include this distinction. I see some options:
Add a type (“accounting”, "view’) on the company. For view company a link to an accounting one is required. So for document posted with a view company, the accounting linked company is used to make the entries.
The disadvantages are no constraint at DB level for the company link in account, user may not see easily which kind of company it is, it can become complicate to write rules.
Replace the current company field on the document for a new one link to a new sub-model of company (e.g. business unit).
The disadvantages are many schema and code changes, invoice should have both field probably.
Add a new field next to company on most of the operational documents.
The disadvantages are a complex setup for simple use case.
We too have the question, and for the moment we have solved it by adding the notion of ‘trade name’ to the company (a single chart of accounts) and to the users. Overriding document templates for reports requiring editing in either ‘trade name’.
There is still a small point to deal with for the invoicing, because the generation of the invoice or the moment of the posting, can take place on the wrong ‘trade name’, but I think to correct it by a domain on the display of the list of invoice.
My 2 cents
We implemented a set of “office_xx” modules to get company subdivisions/branch offices for a company.
They allow to filter optionally products and parties, and mandatory the common documents such as sales, invoices, … defining offices and current office in user preferences in a similar way to company (record rules).
