Projecting the Folder topology onto legal entities and sites
How to decompose Sage X3's Folder/company/site/legislation hierarchy into D365 legal entities, inventory sites, warehouses, operating units and financial dimensions — with the decision table for each projection option and the trade-offs a programme must weigh.
What you will be able to do
Explain the Folder concept in depth and why it has no single D365 equivalent
Evaluate three Folder-projection options — single environment with multiple legal entities, multiple environments, and hybrid — and articulate the trade-offs of each
Map X3 Companies to D365 legal entities, including multi-company Folder implications
Decompose typed X3 Sites into inventory sites, warehouses, operating units and financial dimensions
Translate X3 Legislations into legal-entity country/region, Globalization features and Electronic Reporting
Describe the shared-versus-company-scoped table split in D365 and why X3 has no equivalent concern
Introduction
The Conceptual Foundations module established that Sage X3's Folder is a broad application and data container with no mechanical D365 equivalent. This chapter takes that claim apart and works through the projection in detail — every layer of X3's topology mapped to its D365 counterpart, with the decision criteria, trade-offs, and…
The Folder in Depth
A Folder is Sage X3's broadest organisational container. It is more than a data partition — it is a configuration and application boundary that carries:
Folder Projection: Three Options and Their Trade-offs
The programme must choose how to project each Folder onto D365. Three patterns cover almost every real-world topology:
Companies to Legal Entities
The Company → legal entity mapping is the cleanest in the programme. Both are the statutory accounting boundary for financial reporting, tax filing, and audit. The mapping is one-to-one in most engagements, with three considerations:
Typed Sites and Their D365 Counterparts
X3 Sites are typed, and the type determines the D365 counterpart. A per-site semantic audit — jointly authored by the X3 functional lead and the D365 architect — must classify every site before the legal-entity and site design is finalised.
Legislations and Country/Region
X3 Legislation codes drive localised statutory behaviour: VAT treatment (rates, reverse-charge rules, Intrastat), statutory chart-of-accounts structure (PCG for France, MAR for Belgium), fiscal-reporting formats (e-invoicing, EC Sales List), and withholding-tax regimes. In D365, the same behaviour is delivered through:
The Shared-Versus-Company-Scoped Table Split
Shared tables (no DataAreaId column) — visible across all legal entities within the environment. Examples: DimensionAttribute (financial dimension definitions), MainAccount (chart of accounts), ExchangeRateType (exchange-rate types), NumberSequenceTable (number-sequence definitions), SecurityRole (security roles), SysWorkflowTable…
Governance and Sign-off
The Folder projection is signed off before Wave 1 of the migration. The sign-off artefact is a topology document containing:
Knowledge check
Summary
The Sage X3 Folder topology uses four layers — Folder, Company, Site, Legislation — to express boundaries that D365 handles through environments, legal entities, inventory sites, warehouses, operating units, financial dimensions, and country/region localisations. The migration is a decomposition, not a rename.