A residence fund manager walked us through their structure on a discovery call. They run about eight legal entities: four investment funds, the general partner that manages them, a property management company, and a few smaller support businesses. One fund is winding down and new ones will open. The books live in QuickBooks Desktop 2021, one file per entity, so an intercompany charge is keyed in each file it touches, and moving between entities means signing out of one and into another. One fund is euro-denominated with its assets in Europe. Vendor payables arrive in Mexican pesos. Partners hold annual credits that are tracked in a custom portal and a property management platform, and the portfolio analysis happens in Excel.
What they asked for was specific. All entities on one platform. Easy movement between them. Intercompany recorded once. A view across the whole portfolio of properties, without consolidating the funds into the parent, because the funds are independent entities and nobody needs group statements. And the basics first, with anything that needs development held for a second phase.
That is a common fund-manager structure, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central maps to it well. This article walks through each piece and sorts it into three buckets: native (configure it), add-on (a published app), or custom (development). The sorting is the part that drives cost, so it is worth doing before an estimate.
Entity Structure
Business Central holds each legal entity as a company inside one environment. Each fund, the general partner, and each support business becomes its own company with its own ledger, chart of accounts, and bank accounts. One sign-in covers all of them. The company switcher opens from any page, lists every company you have access to, and can open a second company in a new browser tab so a fund and the general partner sit side by side.
Opening a new fund is a configuration task. The Create New Company guide offers a setup-data-only template, and the Copy action clones an existing company, so a new fund starts from the chart of accounts, posting setup, and dimensions the other funds already use. The licensing guide lists multiple companies as included with every Essentials or Premium license, with a ceiling of 300 companies per environment.
One structural point to settle early. Environments are tied to a country and its localization, and Microsoft's guidance is that an organization working in multiple countries needs an environment per country. For this manager that is not a constraint, because local statutory filings in other countries stay with local accountants and the European fund needs representation in the books, not a European tax return out of the system. All eight companies can live in one US environment. If a European entity later needs to file locally from Business Central, that entity gets its own environment with that country's localization.
Bucket: native.
Currencies
Each company sets its own local currency on the General Ledger Setup page. The euro fund runs with the euro as its local currency and posts its ledger in euros. The US funds and the general partner run in dollars. The two settings do not interfere with each other, because the local currency is a property of the company, not the environment.
Foreign-currency activity inside any company is handled with currency codes. A vendor that bills in Mexican pesos carries a default currency code of MXN, its invoices post in pesos, and the ledger entry carries the dollar value at the posting date's rate. Bank accounts can also carry a currency. Rates come in through a currency exchange rate service, and the Adjust Exchange Rates batch job revalues open payables, receivables, and bank balances at period end, posting the unrealized gain or loss.
For the portfolio view, the euro fund can also carry an additional reporting currency of US dollars. Business Central then records every ledger entry in both euros and dollars, so a dollar report runs from the euro company's own ledger. Microsoft's documentation is clear that this is a reporting convenience and not a translation method for consolidation, which suits a manager who wants a dollar view and does not want to consolidate.
Bucket: native.
Intercompany Charges
When the general partner pays a cost that belongs to a fund, or a fund owes the management company, the charge is posted once. Business Central's intercompany feature sets each company up as a partner of the others, and a charge to a partner on a purchase invoice line or an intercompany journal records the receivable in the paying company and sends the matching payable to the partner company's inbox. With all companies in the same environment, automatic acceptance creates the receiving entry for a person to post. Intercompany supports partners with different local currencies and different charts of accounts, with each side posting in its own local currency at the current rate.
We covered the mechanics, including month-end allocation of pooled costs, in Cost allocation and intercompany due-to/due-from in Business Central.
Bucket: native.
Portfolio View
This was the request that needed the most care: see all the properties across all the funds, manage fund by fund, and do not consolidate.
Inside each fund, properties are a dimension. A Property dimension on every posted entry gives income, expense, and balance by property within the fund, and analysis views and financial reports slice by it. Ten properties in one fund and fifteen in another are ten and fifteen dimension values.
Across funds, there are three ways to get the 25-property view, and the word "consolidation" is where the confusion starts.
- A reporting container. Business Central's consolidation copies ledger entries from each fund, set up as a business unit, into a separate company that Microsoft describes as "just a container for the consolidated data" with no live business data. Dimensions carry across, so the Property dimension survives the copy, and the euro fund's entries are translated at a rate you set. Nobody closes books in that company and no eliminations are required for a management view; eliminations in Business Central are a manual journal you choose to post, and a fund can be excluded with one checkbox. This is the fastest route to a single property-level report across every fund, and it uses nothing outside the product.
- The company hub. The Company Hub is a role center that lists every company with financial KPIs and a link into each one. It is a dashboard, not a report builder, and it answers the "how is each fund doing" question in one screen.
- Power BI. Microsoft's Power BI apps for Business Central work per company, so a cross-fund model is a custom report built over the Business Central API, where one query is mapped across the list of companies. That is the right home for the FP&A work that lives in Excel today, and it is also where reservation data from outside the ledger joins the financials.
Our recommendation for a first phase is the reporting container plus the company hub, with Power BI as the second-phase home for analysis that mixes ledger and operational data.
Bucket: native for the first two, native with report-building work for the third.
Investors & Funds
The same investor can hold positions in more than one fund. In Business Central, the investor is a contact linked to a customer or vendor record in each fund company where money moves. Records are held per company, so the general partner holds the master copy and master data synchronization pushes name, address, and payment details out to each fund, which keeps one investor from drifting into three spellings. An Investor dimension on fund entries gives activity by investor inside each fund.
What Business Central does not have is a fund-accounting module. Capital accounts, commitment and call tracking, and waterfall calculations are not in the capabilities list for Essentials or Premium. This manager did not ask to bring those into the system, which is the right call for a first phase. If that changes, it is an add-on conversation.
Bucket: native for investor records and dimensions; add-on if capital accounting is ever in scope.
Partner Credits
Each partner receives an allocation of credits once a year, spends them in a handful of ways, mostly on reservations, and the balance expires at the end of a reservation year that runs October to September, with some credit types rolling over. Cancellations return credits or not depending on policy. Today that ledger lives in a custom portal and a property management platform, and reconciling it takes several people.
There is no partner-credits module in Business Central, but the ledger itself is built from standard parts. Each partner is an account, and a credit entry carries the partner, the fund, the credit year, and the credit type as dimensions, so the balance by partner and by fund is live and the expiring balance can be read apart from the balance that carries forward. The annual allocation is a recurring general journal with one line per partner, posted once a year with the credit count and dollar value set before it posts, and reused the following year. A year-end journal clears the expiring balance and leaves the carry-forward types in place, with the cleared figures staying in the ledger as the record of what expired. Every entry carries a reason code, posted entries cannot be edited, and adjustments route through a journal approval workflow. All of that is configuration.
Three pieces are not. First, the control that stops a partner from spending more credits than they hold: Business Central's own balance check is a customer credit-limit warning, and Microsoft's documentation states you can post even when the limit is exceeded, so a hard stop is a small extension or a check in the portal before the booking is made. Second, consumption and cancellation: a reservation spends credits in the property management platform, so the entries that reduce a balance arrive on the same scheduled feed as the reservation data, which is integration work. Third, the partner portal reading a live balance, which is a call to the Business Central API. Deriving each partner's entitlement from their agreement automatically, instead of setting it on the journal, would be a build as well.
The ledger can be in phase one with the books. The hard stop, the feeds, and the portal connection are the pieces to scope in detail before pricing.
Bucket: native for the ledger, allocation, expiry, and approvals; custom for the balance control, the consumption feed, and the portal connection.
Integrations
Four outside systems came up: the property management platform that runs reservations, the payables and receivables tool, the merchant processor, and the partner portal.
The manager was clear that reservation data does not need to live in the ledger and does not need to arrive live. It needs to land periodically for analysis. That is a scheduled Power Automate flow or an import through configuration packages. Inside Business Central, the natural home for nights booked and occupancy is statistical accounts, which hold non-financial figures tagged with the same dimensions as the financials, so a financial report can put revenue per night next to revenue. Business Central's license includes the right to use Power Automate with Business Central data, and the REST API is how an outside system writes to the ledger when a flow is not enough.
For card payments, the payment service extensions Microsoft ships are PayPal, with WorldPay being retired. Stripe is not on that list, so a Stripe connection is an add-on or integration work. The payables tool and the partner portal are the same: whether a published connector exists is a check we run during scoping, and if none does, the API is the path.
Bucket: add-on where a connector exists, custom integration where it does not. The periodic reservation extract is low-code either way.
Contracts & Documents
The manager wants one place for final contract versions, with visibility of expiry dates. Business Central attaches documents to records, and since April 2026 those attachments can be stored in a SharePoint document library instead of the Business Central database. A property lease or a vendor contract attaches to the vendor, the property, or the posted document, and the file itself lives in SharePoint where the rest of the organization already works.
Expiry tracking and reminders are not a Business Central feature. They belong in a SharePoint list with a Power Automate reminder flow, which is a configuration exercise.
Bucket: native for storage, low-code for the reminders.
Local Accountants
Accountants in other countries need to see the books for their entity without becoming full users. Every Essentials or Premium subscription includes up to three External Accountant licenses at no charge, and access is granted per company, so an accountant in Europe sees the euro fund and nothing else.
Bucket: native.
Phase Sequence
| Piece | Bucket | Phase |
|---|---|---|
| Eight companies, switcher, new-fund template | Native | 1 |
| Euro local currency, peso vendors, rate service | Native | 1 |
| Intercompany charges posted once | Native | 1 |
| Property dimension and fund-level reporting | Native | 1 |
| Reporting container and company hub for the 25-property view | Native | 1 |
| SharePoint storage for contracts | Native | 1 |
| External accountant access | Native | 1 |
| Reservation data extract on a schedule | Low-code | 1 or 2 |
| Cross-fund Power BI model | Report build | 2 |
| Contract expiry reminders | Low-code | 2 |
| Payment processor and payables tool connectors | Add-on or custom | 2 |
| Partner credit ledger, annual allocation, expiry, approvals | Native | 1 |
| Credit balance hard stop, consumption feed, portal connection | Custom | 2 |
The basics the manager asked for are in the first column and the first phase. The custom work is three bounded pieces around the credit ledger, and they can wait until the books are running.
Next Conversation
If you manage several funds or entities and want to know which of your requirements configure, which need an app, and which need development, send us your structure and we will sort it the same way.