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Best Practice: Sales From Multiple Legal Entities

You have set up your Salesforce org to use JustOn Billing & Invoice Management and initially modeled your billing and invoicing scenario. Now you want to extend the invoicing solution: go international or onboard additional business entities – fully leveraging the built-in multi-tenancy approach.

Solution Overview

The following table lists invoicing-relevant information that can differ depending on the business context or target market and points to the corresponding configuration in JustOn Billing & Invoice Management:

Context-Specific Data Related Configuration
Seller data such as name, address, VAT ID, bank details, etc. Individual business entity
Seller-specific logo Template option
Tax situations Individual tax rules
Invoice number range Individual counters
Target language Individual templates
Seller-specific invoice run or dunning run Individual filters and dunning levels
Invoicing currency Multi-currency support
Bookkeeping accounts G/L account assignment rules
Collective account settings
Data isolation control Salesforce sharing rules

Info

This article summarizes common use cases, outlining the steps to take and the expected results. You may not need all options listed here, and you may need additional ones to match your specific business scenarios.

Solution Details

Creating Individual Business Entities

Business entities hold invoicing-relevant or accounting-relevant information of your company or company subdivision, like address data, bank data or tax data. When using business entities, you can automatically assign a business entity to an invoice during the invoice creation.

Depending on your organization's requirements, you must create individual business entities for specific regions, customers or other criteria. Doing so, specify the relevant legal entity's information, such as

Defining Business Entity

If you work with business entities, you can apply individual company information. Assume you want to use business entity-specific logos and footer data, whereas the other information (like invoice texts and table configurations) remain the same. This is possible in one template. However, if you also need individual texts and invoice tables, consider using multiple templates.

Printing Business Entity-Specific Logo

Creating Relevant Tax Rules

If you sell products with different tax rates or operate different markets where variable or multiple tax rates apply, you need rules to determine the correct tax rate for an invoice line item. To this end, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management supports tax rules. They provide for tax rate lookups along various combinations of account region, merchant or business entity region, product tax class, product group, etc.

To have the software calculate the taxes based on tax rules, you set up the tax rules that meet your business requirements – usually a dedicated tax rule for every applicable tax rate, including one for reverse charge.

EU-based businesses may have to apply different tax rates to invoice line items depending on the given invoice region. Typically, there are four tax situations:

  • Home, tax ID available or not available
  • Other EU country, tax ID not available
  • Reverse charge applicable, tax ID available
  • Non-EU country, tax ID not available

For Germany, covering the outlined scenario requires the following tax rules:

Tax Situation Tax Rule Tax Rate Invoice Region
Germany, tax ID available or not available DE_VAT 19% DE
EU country, tax ID not available EU_VAT 19% EU
Reverse charge applicable, tax ID available RC 0% RC
Non-EU country, tax ID not available NON_EU 0% NON-EU

If you use individual business entities to cover specific legal and fiscal regulations of your target markets, the business entity is the decisive criterion for determining the relevant tax. So make sure to add the correct business entity to the corresponding tax rule.

Enabling Standard Tax Rules Deploying Tax Rules

Creating Individual Invoice Counters

Invoices, credits, cancellations and dunning reminders must have unique numbers to comply with legal regulations. In Draft status, these numbers are temporary and of no legal relevance. When finalizing invoices or dunning reminders, however, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management creates the unique and unalterable numbers based on defined counters – custom settings that define how the unique numbers for invoices (or other documents) are produced, including the pattern, reset interval, etc.

Depending on the business contexts to cover, you may have to create individual counters. Individual entities or particular target markets may require specific invoice numbers, like, for example

Example Template Produced Counter
[Year]-[Month]-{00000} 2025-Jan-00001
DE[Year:yy][Month:MM]{00000} DE250100001
[Year][AccountAccountName]{00000} 2025ACME00001

Configuring Counters

Creating Individual Templates

The template is the model based on which the PDF copy of an invoice, dunning reminder or account statement is rendered. It defines its contents and layout. Produced PDF documents are intended to be distributed via email or postal service to customers, and can be exported and archived.

template
Combining data with a template to produce an output

In addition to the fields that are printed to the PDF, the templates also include texts for the email that JustOn sends to distribute the rendered PDF documents.

You usually create a dedicated template for each language you want to support (and, possibly, other criteria), as well as the associated template details to cover your use cases.

How to specify which template to use?

Depending on your business scenarios, you may have to use dedicated templates to support, for example,

  • different locales (languages),
  • specific customer groups,
  • individual business entities.

So if there are multiple templates, what is the best way to specify which one to use – for a specific use case or as a fallback?

This is how JustOn Billing & Invoice Management looks for a template:

ON_Template field on the invoice source records
↳ ON_Template field on the account
     ↳ Template field on the business entity
          ↳ Default template

(1) To predefine a specific template for your standard use cases, you usually set it via the ON field ON_Template on your source records for the invoice generation.

Generally, ON_Template is a formula field. In the simplest use case, you just name the template to use. If necessary, however, you use a formula that returns a dedicated template according to your specific criteria – target region, business entity, product group, etc.

(2) As a more general setting, you can define a dedicated template per customer – using an ON_Template field on the account. If the source record does not specify a template, JustOn uses the one set on the account.

(3) In addition, you can set a template per business entity. If there is no template defined on the source record or the account, it is retrieved from the Template field on the business entity that is related to the target record (invoice or statement).

(4) If neither the source record, the account nor the business entity specify a template to use, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management falls back to the Default template. Note that you can leave the Default template shipped with the package untouched and use this as your fallback, or create a custom template according to your needs and name it Default.

Info

As long as an invoice has the status Draft, you can assign another template to the invoice.

Configuring Standard Templates

Additional options

Additional options for configuring templates include:

For details, see Working With Templates and Configuring PDF Creation.

Creating Individual Filters and Dunning Levels

JustOn Billing & Invoice Management uses filters to define which records to include in the invoice run and dunning levels to control dunning processes.

The two types of custom settings allow for specifying conditions to restrict the set of records to be processed. So when working with multiple business entities, you can define individual invoice run filters and dunning levels for each business entity – providing the business entity name as a condition, like

Tenant__c = 'Office Paris'

Creating Invoice Run Filter Configuring Dunning Levels

Enabling Multi-Currency Support

Certain business use cases require support for multiple currencies. Administrators can enable multiple currencies in their Salesforce orgs.

Note

Be aware of the following implications:

  • Once multi-currency support is enabled for an organization, it cannot be disabled.

  • Even though you have enabled multiple currencies, JustOn recommends to use one currency per account, that is, to use the account currency for all operations and records related to an account.

    For some functions, Salesforce and JustOn operate with plain values without regard to currencies. In these cases, simply combining values of different currencies without conversion would produce wrong records.

For details, see Manage Multiple Currencies in the Salesforce Help.

When working with multiple currencies, you can issue the invoices for specific recipient groups with different currencies. Generally, you then have Salesforce convert the defined price from one currency to the other.

However, you can circumvent the conversion and explicitly define multiple prices in different currencies. To this end, you define both recipient-specific price fields and recipient-specific currency fields, and have a dedicated controlling field decide which (recipient-specific) currency to apply.

Enabling Multi-Currency Support

Enabling Booking Accounts for Revenues and Taxes

JustOn Billing & Invoice Management allows for writing bookkeeping data for revenues and taxes from finalized invoices. These records can then be transferred to accounting systems like DATEV, SAP or Microsoft Dynamics.

To provide for the correct booking account allocation, you create dedicated Assignment Rules - G/L Account and Collective Account settings. Using these settings, you define the criteria (fields and values to match) based on which a booking detail is assigned a booking account.

If you use individual business entities to cover specific legal and fiscal regulations of your target markets, the business entity is the decisive criterion for determining the relevant booking account. So make sure to add the correct business entity to the corresponding G/L account assignment rule or collective account setting.

Enabling Standard Booking Accounts

Using Salesforce Sharing Rules

JustOn Billing & Invoice Management does not provide a data segregation mechanism along business entities. However, you can use roles and sharing rules to control your users' access to specific data records.

Roles and sharing rules are part of Salesforce's flexible, layered data sharing design that allows to expose different data sets to different sets of users. This way, users can do their job without seeing data they do not need to see, which helps to minimize the risk of abuse and loss of data.

Salesforce data sharing design

Organization: Organizations allow accessing authorized users only, if required, limited to specific times and locations.

Objects and fields: Permissions and permission sets allow accessing objects and object fields. That is, they control which type of data users can see and edit.

Processes: Custom permissions allow accessing certain custom processes. They specify which users can use certain functions.

Records: Using roles and sharing rules, you can limit the access to specific records.

For details, see Control Who Sees What

Sharing Rules | Salesforce Help