What is it ?
Depending on your organizational structure an entity could correspond to a branch, depot, cost center, division, profit center, work center, warehouse, store or your entire company. It corresponds to the lowest atomic organizational component that will be tracked within the system.

What does that mean to me ?
If you have a simple, single location company then the answer is "not a lot !" as you will only need to establish a single entity that corresponds to your entire company.

However, as your corporate structure expands to multiple locations or autonomous areas, then the concept of an entity group composed of an arbitrary collection of discrete self contained accounting entities becomes an extremely powerful tool.

As a single accounting entity can belong to any number of entity groups you have the ability of maintaining multiple structures that can be used for enquiry and reporting purposes. For example, you can easily establish entity groups corresponding to your traditional corporate hierarchy, typically along geographic lines or core business lines.

However, you may also establish additional structures that cut across these traditional, rigid views of your company to enable easy comparison of key business areas. For example, if your entities correspond to branches and these are ranked as A, B or C grade, then simply establish entity groups to reflect this and include the discrete entities that belong to each, without regard to the traditional corporate structural view you may have.

Entity groups can be established and reorganized as required. If you need a special one off consolidation of any arbitrary grouping of entities to extract meaningful information, they can be established on the fly.

The dynamic nature of the entity group, and the atomic accounting isolation of discrete entities means that the system can easily support multiple companies or reporting structures, with fully automatic consolidation and elimination capabilities.

How does it work ?
An entity is simply an accounting building block that is known to the system. When a new entity is created it is automatically added to your menu system for access and use with the various system transactions. For example, when an entry is posted to the general ledger it is always to a specific account within a nominated entity (and the system automatically generates inter-entity entries for transactions that cross these accounting boundaries).

However, the real power comes about through harnessing the power of the underlying relational database to allow these entity building blocks to be grouped together to build, or mirror, larger, more complex structures, coupled with the fact that the system has been designed from the ground up with this building block approach in mind.

So, if you wanted to look at stock availability in a certain geographic area, produce a sales report for all of your A class branches, or perform any of the other enquiry or reporting functions on a specific group of entities, the system can determine the discrete component entities, extract and consolidate the required information for each individual entity, and then present the required details in summary or detailed form.