Re-purpose Business Unit for a Different Company/Country

eydeak

VIP Member
We need to create a new business unit and someone suggesting re-using one of our closed business units. And, in this case, they suggested using a closed business unit for Canada and re-purposing it for a new location in the US. For audit purposes or anything, would this cause any reporting issues for the closed business?

For background, I'm in IT and not Accounting, so I mainly want to know more to improve my knowledge of JDE. I've never worked someplace where we've re-purposed a business unit like this, so I'm interested in what pitfalls or gotchas we should be looking for.

Thanks,
 
Hi Ellen

I have been a Controller in a past life. From a Finance standpoint, it is not typically recommended to re-purpose business units. A few questions to understand better:

1. does the existing business unit have remaining balances in the Trial Balance
2. What was the currency of the existing business unit? CAD or USD?
3. What is the currency of the new business unit in the US? CAD or USD?

If there is a mis-match between 2 and 3, it could get a bit dicey. Is there a specific reason that they want to re-use a business unit as opposed to just creating a new one and copying over the COA from the one they wanted to use into the new one? That would be the cleanest and easiest way.
 
I think that the MCU they are looking at has been closed long enough that it shouldn't have any balances.
Yes, we would be changing the currency code from CAD to USD.
I think the push to re-use something is coming from Supply Chain and not accounting. I heard someone from the Supply Chain team say it was a 6 week lead time to setup a brand new MCU.
I'm kind of on the fringe of the project myself. But I'd never worked anyplace where we re-used an MCU and certainly not re-used it for a different company code in a different country with a different currency. So, I wanted to look into a little.
I can certainly pass on anything I learn to the Finance people on the project which they may use to argue against the re-use direction.

Thanks,
Ellen
 
If they are re-using one from within the same company, I don't see any issue. Likewise if you are using one from another company that has never been used, i.e. no transactions in F0911, F0902, F4201, F4211, etc. you should be fine.

Otherwise, I wouldn't do it. If you move it from company 1 to company 2 in the F0006, then there are a couple of jobs you run to update the company in the F0911 and F0902. If you don't do this, you have errors on your integrity reports and sometimes this can cause issues on your canned JDE reports, if you're using them. If you do run those update jobs, your history is now incorrect, not to mention the currency and intercompany issues that would be raised.
 
I am a developer, not a BA and I certainly don't know your complete situation so keep that in mind. But in my opinion, and this is just an opinion, you are better off creating a new business unit. You are trying to save some one time setup work by reusing an old Business Unit, but it there may be unforseen issues going forward that you will have to deal with forever.
 
I have a similar background to Gina's, and I have consulting experience in attempting to unravel the audit nightmare that resulted after my client reused master data. I'd strongly recommend against reuse.
 
It is very easy to create a new business unit for your purpose. I would not recommend re-purposing a business unit for many reasons both system and process related. Is there a reason why someone from the business desires to re-use the business unit? Perhaps you can ask them to state their business case and that they develop an impact analysis to insure that there are not any undesired consequences of you do move ahead as requested.
 
I just stumbled on this post of mine and realized I never posted a follow-up. Based on some of the warnings here about the existing data on the old currency code, Finance was able to push back and we ended up creating a new MCU. I appreciate all of the feedback.
 
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