UK-built · CDM · CIS · MTD
Several companies or offices on one platform, properly apart, with a group view above them. Built to your structure, not to ours.
Multi-entity software lets a group run more than one trading company, or more than one office, on a single system. The test of it is whether the businesses are genuinely kept apart while somebody above them can still see the whole picture.
Unibuild does both. Each company keeps its own records, its own paperwork and numbering, its own people and its own finance identity, and a group view sits above them for whoever is entitled to it. Because every deployment is a bespoke build, the structure is decided around your group rather than picked from a list of tiers.
Which is where the group's actual position lives, and only one person can update it.
The core partition. One company's clients, projects, quotations, timesheets, certificates and job costs are not visible from another, and not reachable by somebody working in it.
Each company issues its own quotations, invoices, certificates and reports under its own name, logo, address and contact details, with its own document number sequences running independently.
Staff belong to a business. Somebody employed by one does not appear in the other's labour run, timesheet grid or dropdowns unless you deliberately put them there.
Each company invoices and gets paid as itself: its own VAT registration, its own CIS position, its own remittance details and its own invoice numbering.
The first of the two deliberate crossings. Whoever you entitle to it sees the group: turnover, margin and cost position, labour and plant, certificates and expiries and incidents, with each business still identifiable inside the total.
The second. A director entitled to more than one business moves between them without logging out, closing anything or keeping a second password somewhere.
There is no standard group structure. So there is no standard build.
Unibuild is a bespoke deployment. Nobody is fitted into somebody else's idea of how a group works, because the shape of it is decided with you during implementation and then built. Whatever the arrangement is, if it is how your business actually runs, that is what it is set up to do.
Two trading companies. A parent with three subsidiaries. One company with six regional offices. A joint venture that exists for one job and then stops. A contracting arm and a maintenance arm that share a yard and nothing else.
The four separations on this page are the usual answer, not the only one. If two of your companies genuinely share a plant register, or a compliance officer who has to see everything, or one price library, that is a decision you make at implementation rather than a limit you work around afterwards.
Groups reorganise. A branch becomes a company, a company is sold, two merge. The structure is configuration and development rather than something baked into a plan you bought, so it moves when the business does.
Bring the org chart. It is genuinely the fastest way through this.
Ten minutes drawing your actual structure tells us more than an hour of feature questions, and it is the conversation that decides whether any of this fits.They get sold as the same feature and they are not. Working out which you have, before anybody demonstrates anything, saves a great deal of time.
One legal entity, working out of several places. A head office and two depots, or a northern branch that runs its own jobs and its own people but invoices under the same company and the same VAT number.
Separate registered businesses. They file their own accounts, hold their own VAT registration and CIS position, and a client of one has no reason to know the other exists.
These are the six questions that come up in the second conversation, every time, so they are answered here rather than saved for it.
The licence is priced by trading entity, so a second company is not free, and the quote form asks how your group is arranged for exactly that reason. What does not change is the per-person position: users stay unlimited inside each business, so adding the second company's site teams costs nothing further.
They can be given both, and it is a decision rather than a side effect. Everybody else sees only the business they work in. This matters most for directors, a shared compliance officer and the office manager who does the buying for the group.
Very common, and the usual reason is a business being bought or a division being spun out. It is a configuration and development exercise rather than a new subscription, and the existing company carries on trading through it. Worth telling us early if you know one is coming.
Each customer gets their own app, published to the App Store and Google Play under their own name and icon. Where a group wants one app across every company, or one per company, that is part of the same conversation as everything else here, and it is decided rather than assumed.
Each company invoices as itself, on its own numbering, with its own VAT registration and CIS position, and money arrives in its own account. The group view is a reporting layer over the top, not a merged ledger, so the statutory picture per company stays clean.
It happens, usually because a group describes itself the way Companies House sees it rather than the way it works day to day. That is why implementation starts with the org chart rather than with the software, and why it is worth bringing whoever actually knows how the money moves.
Most of this is decided in one conversation, not in a procurement exercise.
Bring the structure as it really is, including the awkward parts: the shared yard, the person who works for both, the company that only exists for one client.Same platform, same records. How people reach it, what it produces, and what it connects to.
Choosing software for a group, what it actually costs, and the commercial questions a second entity brings with it.
