Creating New Companies in Business Central

In Business Central, the container for business data that belongs to a business unit or legal entity is referred to as a company. When you sign up for Business Central, you are given a demonstration company and an empty company, My Company. Switching between the companies is easy: just go to My Settings and move to the other company. But you can also create new companies in Business Central depending on your business needs. When you create a new company, an assisted setup guide helps you get the basics in place. Then, you can import relevant data from your legacy system or another company in Business Central.

Creating a New Company

If you decide to add a company to your Business Central, you can use the Create New Company assisted setup guide to get you started. The setup wizard is available from the Companies page and from the lookup in the Company field on the My Settings page.

The setup wizard offers three templates and a blank option:

Evaluation - Sample Data
This creates a company that is similar to the demonstration company with sample data and setup data.
Production - Setup Data Only
This creates a company that is similar to My Company with setup data but without sample data.
Advanced Evaluation - Complete Sample Data This creates a company with setup data and complete sample data for all features, including Manufacturing and Service Management.
Create New - No Data
This creates a blank company without setup data.

If you want to get started easily with a new company, choose Production - Setup Data Only and then import your own business data, such as customers, items, and vendors. Choose the New template if you want to set everything up from scratch. In that case, you can use the Company Setup assisted setup guide to help you get started with essential setup data.

Note

When you create a new company, it takes a few minutes before you can access it in Business Central. The setup status on the Companies page shows when the new company is ready for you. Then, you can switch to the new company by using My Settings.

During your 30 day trial, you can create any number of new companies, but they will only be available during your trial. For more information, contact your Business Central partner.

Copying a company

On the Companies page, you can use the Copy action to create a second company based on the contents of an existing company. This is useful, for example, when you want to test a company without disrupting production data.

Important

This function cannot be used to take a backup of a company. Taking a company backup begins by exporting the database as a .bacpac file. For more information, see Exporting Databases in the development and administration help.

Company Setup

When you sign in to a new company, the Company Setup wizard runs automatically and helps you get started. You will be asked for information about your business, such as the address, bank details, and inventory costing method. We ask for this information because it is used as a basis for many areas in Business Central that you will then not have to set up manually later.

For example, your company address is included in invoices and other documents, your bank information is used in payments, and the costing method is used to calculate prices as well as inventory valuation.

Once you have the basics in place, you can set up remaining core areas. Then, you are ready to add business data, such as customers and vendors. For more information, see Setting Up Business Central.

Companies and Environments

People sometimes support more than one company and need to easily switch from working in one company to another in Business Central. For example, a business might have sales offices in cities and multiple countries, so it has created a separate business unit for each office. The offices that are in the same country are set up as separate companies in a shared environment. Other offices are created as companies in separate environments because they are geographically based in other countries.

What's an environment? Companies in Business Central exist in what are referred to as environments. There are two types of environments, Production and Sandbox. In short, production environments contain live business data, and sandbox environments are used as a safe place to test things like new business processes or features. For more information, see Types of environments. If you have access to a company, you have access to the environment it's in. If you have access to more than one company, and those companies are in different environments, when you sign in to Business Central you must specify the environment that you want to work in. Environments are particular to a given country, so if your organization works in multiple countries, you need separate environments for each country.

What's a company? Think of a company as a container that holds information about a legal entity. Using the example above, the business has a sales office in Seattle and another in New York, so it creates a company in Business Central for each office so that it can manage operations for each office separately.

For more information, see Switching to Another Company or Environment.