How to Run Purchasing Across Separate Legal Entities in a Multi-Site Restaurant Group

If your restaurant group runs each site or brand as its own legal company, purchasing does not behave the way it does for a single-entity operator. Shared purchase orders name the wrong buyer, invoices land on the wrong company's books, and a new brand gets bolted onto an existing account instead of standing on its own. Follow these five steps to set purchasing up correctly across separate legal entities, from the first structural decision to the last invoice: decide your account structure, raise purchase orders per entity, provision each new brand cleanly, bill supply between your own companies, and keep every invoice posting to the right entity.

Step 1: Decide on one shared account or one account per entity

Start with the structural decision, because every later step depends on it: run one shared operating account for the whole group, or provision each legal entity as its own account. Base the answer on how separate your entities really are in law, banking and tax, not on how the group feels to run day to day.

The pull toward one shared account is understandable. It looks simpler, and a group that grew one site at a time rarely stops to redraw its buying structure. But the moment two legal entities sit behind a single customer record, purchase orders start naming the wrong buyer and supplier invoices post against the wrong company. Untangling that by hand every month is slower and riskier than setting the structure up correctly once. Use the table below as the quick version of the decision.

If every site trades under a single legal entity, a shared account is the right call and your controls belong at outlet level. If the sites are genuinely separate companies, work through the remaining steps: each one sets up a piece of purchasing, billing and stock so it stays clean across the group.

Step 2: Raise purchase orders under each entity, not across them

Do not try to make one account buy on behalf of two companies. A purchase order is a commitment from one legal buyer to one supplier: it carries a single company name, a single tax registration and a single set of payment terms, so it cannot represent two entities at once. This is not a software limit you can configure away; it is what a purchase order is. Forcing two companies onto one order only moves the problem to the invoice.

Instead, let each entity raise its own POs under its own name, and consolidate demand a level higher, at the planning stage, rather than on the order itself. Supy gives each entity a consolidated multi-outlet view of its requisitions and one-tap PO generation, so buying for all the sites inside one entity stays fast without forcing two companies onto one document. Where you want group-wide volume on a single supplier line, that is a separate pattern covered in consolidated purchase orders for restaurant groups, which handles many sites inside one entity, not many entities.

Step 3: Provision each new brand as its own account from day one

When the group opens a new brand as a separate legal entity, set it up as an independent account with its own suppliers, tax registration and users from the very first order. Retrofitting separation after invoices have already posted to a shared account is far harder than starting clean, because you are then unpicking history as well as changing the setup.

Work through provisioning as a short, ordered job. Register the brand as its own account, attach its own supplier contacts and delivery schedules, and set its own approval chain and spending policies before the first order goes out. Supy supports up to five sequential approvers triggered by branch and order value, and spending policies scoped to specific locations and people, so each entity enforces its own buying rules. A three-tier group, outlet and location hierarchy then keeps every entity isolated in its own records while the group still sees across all of them.

Step 4: Bill inter-entity supply with per-group price lists

If one of your entities supplies another, for example a central kitchen or commissary feeding the outlets, set up a rule to bill between the companies you both own rather than pricing each transfer by hand. Re-pricing and journaling every transfer manually does not scale past a handful of sites, and it is where inter-entity numbers most often drift.

The mechanism that removes the manual step is a price list per receiving entity. Supy lets a supplying entity maintain separate price lists per customer group, with cost-plus, markup or fixed pricing per group, so each receiving entity is invoiced automatically at the agreed price. You set the rule once; the invoices follow it. The stock side of a central-kitchen transfer and the internal-invoicing detail are their own topic, covered in central kitchen transfer pricing and internal invoicing; here the point is simply that inter-entity billing should be a rule, not a monthly spreadsheet.

Step 5: Keep every invoice posting to the right entity

Finally, close the gap where invoices mispost. They mispost for one reason above all others: two entities share one account or one supplier record, so the system has no clean way to know which company an invoice belongs to. Scope every account, supplier and credit note to a single entity and the ambiguity disappears, because each document already carries the company that ordered it.

Supy enforces that credit notes are scoped to a single operator account, so one brand's supplier credits never mix with another's. Each entity receives supplier invoices to its own inbox, where they are matched against that entity's own purchase orders, and each entity syncs to its own accounting ledger through Supy's 75+ integrations. That is how an invoice ends up on the right company's books by default instead of being corrected by hand after the fact. It also removes the reconciliation work that shared accounts quietly create. You can see the buying side of this in Supy's restaurant procurement software.

Confirm which setup your group should run

Pull the steps together with one question: is each site its own legal entity? If the answer is no, one entity trading across many sites, a shared account is right and your effort belongs at outlet level, in approvals, spending limits and inter-site stock transfers. If the answer is yes, several separate companies, provision each entity on its own account, scope its suppliers and credit notes to that entity, and use per-customer-group price lists for any supply that moves between them.

The mistake almost every multi-entity group makes is deciding this by default rather than on purpose, then paying for it in month-end journals. Pick the branch you are in, set the structure once, and purchasing stays clean as the group adds its next brand.