When you need to work as a consultant in a company that is separate from the one that you are originally employed at, tracking the time and cost of your work will be important to both companies. The multi-company project reporting functionality enables the possibility of reporting once in your own company, which will in return update the reporting to the company where you are working. It is much easier than being required to register the time and cost in both companies. Both project cost and time reporting are supported in this functionality.
The company, in which you are originally employed at, is referred to as the Employee company or the Supplier company, and the company which you are providing the consulting services to, will be referred to as the Customer Company. The relevant activities for the project from both companies should be linked in the setup stage initially. When you report time in the employee company, inter-company transactions will be created in the customer company project. The customer company approvals of these transactions are updated back to the employee company transaction. Direct costs in the employee company transaction will govern the revenue of the customer company transaction. Vouchers can be created for inter-company liabilities in both companies using this functionality.
You are able to select a revenue method for the multi-company project reporting transactions which will determine whether or not the invoices should be created for the employee company transactions.
It is possible to create employees automatically in the customer company, if you, as the reporting user do not have any employment registered in the customer company. Creating the employee is based on the set up data for the customer company and the company details. If there is an existing master employment for you in the customer company then that employment information will be used instead of creating new employees. Project access will be handled in the standard way, i.e. employees for the reporting user should have access to the customer company and employee company project.
To be able to use Multi-Company Project Reporting functionality links between the Customer Company Activity and Employee Company Activity need to be setup. In IFS Cloud 22R1 it is possible to do it in two ways.
By using Multi-Company Project Reporting Activity Link Setup or
By using Multi-Company Project Reporting Rule Setup
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.
When upgrading to 22R1, new Object Property ENABLE_MCPR_RULES, will be created with property value set to “NO” by default. For using the Multi-Company Project Reporting Rule setup, this property needs to be set to “YES”.
When setting the Object Property ENABLE_MCPR_RULES to "YES" rules are generated using the existing information in Multi-Company Project Reporting Activity Link Setup by running a Background Job.
Not possible to exclude sub-project/activity/report-code
In this new implementation our recommendation is to use the wildcard “%” for customer sub-project, activity, and report code when connecting Customer Project Activity and Employee Project Activity. Hence user will not be able to exclude certain sub-projects, activities, or report codes.
Avoid same customer activity and report code having many employee activities and report codes in the same employee company.
Unsupported pages
While reporting Multi-Company Project Reporting, customer side information cannot be entered through the following pages.
Default MCPR Link not available
Default customer activities cannot be specified for a given Employee Company,
activity, report code, during this release.
As a result of that, while
doing expense reporting customer activity report code cannot be identified when
customer activity contains multiple cost type report codes. In this situation,
application expects a customer activity report code similar to the given employee
activity report code. If the customer activity report code does not have a report
code similar to the customer activity report code, it fetches a random cost
report code connected to the customer activity.
Avoid switching back the Object property
After the upgrade whether the decision is to use the new rule-based setup
or the activity link information page the object property (ENABLE_MCPR_RULES)
should be set accordingly. It is not recommended to switch the setting back
and forth. The reason is that those two tables are not synchronized.
Note! If you have used the MCPR rule setup for some time and should you wish
to switch back to the previous MCPR activity link setup for your MCPR needs,
currently there is no way to convert the rules created so far to activity links
in the system.
Project Information filtering based on Project Access
Customer Project and Employee Project fields related to Multi-Company Project Reporting, will list all the Projects accessible to the user. That means it will not be filtered based on the rule setup in Multi-Company Project Reporting Rule Setup page. The purpose is to improve the performance.