Company Hub and multi-company navigation in Business Central

A finance team running 15 BC companies (subsidiaries, legal entities, project entities) needs to see the world without bouncing through 15 separate company switches. Business Central's Company Hub role centre and a cluster of cross-company features are the standard answer. They're useful, but they have well-defined limits worth understanding before designing on top of them.

The Company Hub role centre. Assigning a user to the COMPANY HUB role centre lands them on a dashboard listing companies they have access to — across the same BC tenant. Each company row shows headline numbers: receivables, payables, cash, sales month-to-date. From there, a click takes the user into the company.

The dashboard is scope-aware — the rows shown depend on the user's permissions in each company. If you don't have access to Company X, it won't appear. This is the cleanest BC pattern for users who work in many companies but rarely all at once.

Setup.

1. Each user has the Allow Company Hub flag.
2. Add companies to the user's hub list — explicitly per user.
3. Refresh the hub regularly via the Refresh Companies in Company Hub action; balances cache, not live (~daily refresh by default).

The caching choice is performance — pulling 15 live company balances on every dashboard load would be slow.

Switching companies. Two paths:

• Top-right company picker in the BC web client — fast, always present.
• From Company Hub — context-aware drill.

Both work; the picker is faster for power users, the hub is friendlier for managers.

Cross-company reporting. A different problem: producing a single report across all companies. BC has:

• Account Schedules that can target a company (manual selection).
• Power BI reports that union data from multiple companies via the BC API.
• Custom data warehouse consolidating BC data per company into a star schema.

The first option doesn't scale beyond a few companies. The second is the practical answer for most mid-market groups. The third is the enterprise answer.

Intercompany features. Cross-company transactions — sending a sales invoice from Company A that becomes a purchase invoice in Company B automatically — are handled by Intercompany Setup. Each company is registered as an intercompany partner of the others; intercompany chart of accounts and dimensions map the integration.

When a sales document is posted with an intercompany partner code, BC creates an inbound document in the partner's company automatically. Reconciliation cycles intercompany AR and AP every period to confirm the books match.

Cross-company users and licensing. Each user licence allows access to multiple companies on the same tenant — no per-company licence fee. So a finance manager touching 15 companies pays for one user licence. This is fundamentally different from the per-tenant model in F&O where legal entities sit inside one tenant.

Limits and what Company Hub doesn't do.

• No cross-tenant. Company Hub spans one BC tenant only. Companies on separate tenants (a subsidiary on a different BC contract) require manual access or external aggregation.
• No consolidated reporting in the hub. Each row is per-company; combined views require Power BI or external consolidation.
• Limited customisation. The Company Hub role centre can be extended (custom factboxes, additional KPIs) but it's not a free-form dashboard.
• No live data. Refresh cadence creates lag — the hub is for management overview, not for the cash position right now.

Cross-company workflows. For routine work spanning companies (intercompany allocations, shared service centres processing AP across several entities), the typical pattern combines:

• Company Hub for navigation.
• Permission sets letting one user act in all relevant companies.
• A shared chart of accounts approach to make consolidations and reporting comparable.
• Automated intercompany setup so cross-company invoices flow without re-keying.

Common pitfalls.

• Company-specific data missing. Master data (items, customers) created in one company isn't replicated to others. Either manage with a master data sync extension or accept the duplication.
• Permission set drift. Permissions diverge per company over time; a user has different access in Company A vs Company B. Periodic audit catches this.
• Hub data stale. Forgot to schedule refresh; managers complain about wrong numbers.
• Mistaking Company Hub for consolidation. It's navigation, not aggregation. Don't promise consolidated reporting from the hub alone.

Where this stops scaling. For groups with more than ~50 companies, or with multi-tenant BC deployments, or with deep cross-company consolidation needs (full eliminations, IFRS disclosure), the right answer is usually a dedicated consolidation tool (OneStream, Financial Reporting in BC, or Microsoft Fabric for analytical consolidation) layered on top of BC. Company Hub is for the mid-market multi-company finance team, not for global groups.