Software Second Look: Gravity Software's Multi-Entity Feature

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In 2019 I wrote a mini-series on Gravity Software, the app (not time & space), in which I reviewed various features and advanced functionality this mid-market offering made available to their customers. Now typically when I write a 'Software Second Look', it re-examines the software as a whole, but in this case I am taking a deeper-dive into only one of Gravity's features, their Multi-Entity Functionality.

Built upon the Microsoft Power Platform, Gravity Software has a lot of potential that other developers simply struggle to provide because of the ability to directly integrate with other Microsoft Dynamics 365 products. The Microsoft Power Platform provides access to a vast database tool-set that supports features that other mid-market accounting solutions can’t provide at the price-point at which you find Gravity situated.

Most noted is Gravity’s ability to support ‘multiple entities.’  Small accounting software packages generally don’t offer this capability at all. If you are using an entry-level cloud-based software application chances are you are paying for a separate subscription for each entity (company, organization, business unit, etc.) you have. You may receive a discount for subsequent subscriptions once you purchase the first one or two, but the more entities you have the more subscriptions you must purchase.

If you are using on-premises software, then you may have ‘software rights’ permitting you to set-up as many different entities as you want but there is just one problem, each one of them is an entirely different database file. This means that you must open each of your entity databases separately. With limited exception, most entry-level accounting software can only open one database at a time and even if it does permit more than one database to be opened it must be done in totally separate windows (running as different 'os instances').

But Gravity is different, as I mentioned in my previous article, it was built from the ground up to handle multiple entities within a single database. It doesn’t require users to log out of one database and into another to perform tasks. Anything you are authorized to do by the Administrator within any entity, you can do while you are logged-in regardless of the entity involved.

Imagine the time savings of not having to log-in and log-out of different database files to post transactions when you are responsible for posting for all your different companies? For example, you might process payroll out of a single entity for your entire organization, but you need to charge those expenses back to each entity. With multiple databases, you have to post a lot of intracompany transactions hitting both balance sheet and revenue statement accounts on each of your entities to allocate all the costs. But with Gravity, you can simply post a Journal Entry that distributes the payroll to the appropriate entities and their associated account numbers (as shown in the example below).

But you might think that sounds like a pretty ‘high level’ task that only a Payroll Administrator, Company Controller, or the CFO might be responsible for making. Instead, you are wondering how Gravity’s Multi-Entity feature might benefit one of the ‘little people’, the typical accounts payable or accounts receivable worker for example. Let’s assume that you have an A/R staff that works across the entire group of your entities and must process receivables for any number of payments from your Customers regardless of which entity generated the Invoice. Gravity’s Multi-Entity feature was made for such a situation.

In the Cash Receipts window above, notice the red box highlighting the field ‘Apply to Multiple Entities’. In this mode when payment information is entered for a customer the information is matched against all the open invoices for all the entities.

By default, Gravity will auto-apply the payment against all such payments to the value of the available funds and show the User applied invoices to which the payment is applied (as shown below). The User has the option of applying the received funds to different invoices should they elect to do so.

My point is illustrated here by the fact that multiple entities are reflected within the ‘red box’ shown in the screenshot. This means this Accounts Receivable User is posting simultaneously to different entities. They are not having to post part of the receivable to several invoices in one entity, then close that file, then open another file, and post the remaining portion of the receivable to other invoices. You can quickly see how multi-entity saves time and effort on the part of your staff.

You probably are wondering about the complexities of reporting for multi-entity. In some other applications, you must ‘combine’ database results in a spreadsheet application like Excel using report export technology or rely upon a 3rd-party application to give you an overall picture of the financials for all of your entities. But that just isn’t so with Gravity. You can just as easily look at an Income Statement that reflects all of your entities as you can a single entity.

But multi-entity reporting isn’t just about the financial statements, it’s about the granular reports that peer down into your subsidiary ledgers as well. For example, the report below gives you a list of payables for vendors in which multiple-entities are listed together.

On the other hand, you might prefer to have your AP report listed by Entity with subtotals by Vendor like the report below. Either way, all of the Entity data is being displayed in the same report and you can slice-n-dice the information any way you want it.

If you are like me you probably go to thinking about someone you know that Gravity sounds perfect for, and then you realized that they had maybe 100 entities spread across the globe in 5 regions. You wondered how Gravity could handle that?

Well, the Microsoft Power Platform is going to support this configuration just as well as with Gravity running 10 entities in 1 region, but you may want to know about how you might streamline some of that ‘slice-n-dice’ I mentioned a moment ago.  That’s where Gravity’s Entity Groups comes into play… they allow you to ‘group’ entities together for a variety of purposes.

For example, you can not create Entity groups and use them for master file security to control access to customers, vendors, and other record types across a group of entities. In the screenshot below you will see a Vendor’s information and notice that ‘Access Criteria’ can be limited to one entity, selected entities, or selected entity group(s), as highlighted in the red box. Entities can be assigned to one or more entity groups; this provides maximum flexibility when/where needed.

But entity groups are also great for reporting. Since multiple entities can be grouped under a common name, then that name can be used in every report which Gravity offers. In our original example, you might have had 20 entities in one of the world regions, and 15 entities in another world region, and 10 in another, and so forth. You could have easily prepared every Gravity report by world region, compared and contrasted regions on the same report, and drilled-down into the various entities making up each region as needed.

There is one more critical point that I want to make about Gravity’s Multi-Entity feature, and this point is very unique. Even though the entities share a common database, they don’t share the same ‘accounting limitations’. You are not stuck with a single ‘closing date’ or ‘fiscal period’ or ‘chart-of-account structure' requirement. Gravity understands that one of your entities may have a fiscal year ending on December 31, and another ending September 30, while another ends on June 30.

That’s why you can define the accounting for each entity even though all entities exist within the same database and even though all entities can ‘work together’ in the ways I have already illustrated as well as many more. 

The reality is that a lot of the higher-priced ‘enterprise’ level products that support multi-entity don’t offer the sophistication and capabilities of Gravity’s multi-entity feature set, and you get all of this for ‘way less’ than what those enterprise products charge. So, if you are needing to migrate from small business accounting software to a mid-market platform that offers multi-entity capabilities at a reasonable price, be sure to check out Gravity Software.