# Company Before Factory

_Published 2026-09-04._

Several companies can share a factory floor and still disagree about what happened there.

One production line consumes material. One warehouse balance changes. One accounting entry follows. But the legal entity that owns each movement matters, and an HR view has a different responsibility from an inventory view.

## Tenancy is not a filter

The manufacturing platform makes company the root of the operational record. Documents belong to a company. Manufacturing orders consume inventory under that company. Accounting receives a posting from the operational event; it does not create stock movement because a journal was edited.

This is the difference between “add a company dropdown” and designing for multiple companies. A dropdown can change what a user sees. It does not stop a cross-company write.

The public record is intentionally anonymized in the [manufacturing case study](/work/factory-erp). The published title describes the system; it does not expose the internal project name.

Inventory is an operational fact. Accounting is a consumer of the resulting movement. HR remains a separate domain even when labor is booked against an order. RTL dashboards and forms have to remain understandable in the language the operator uses.

A shared floor does not require a shared ambiguity.