I have an Acumatica instance with 16 tenants, and one of our requirements is to maintain a single set of supplier (vendor) master data that is shared across all tenants. The expectation is that a supplier and all its related information (locations, addresses, contacts, etc.) should be visible and remain consistent regardless of which tenant the user is working in.
Our initial approach was to use Company Mask so that the supplier records could be shared across all tenants. This works well from a visibility perspective, but we have concerns about update operations.
For example, assume the supplier record is physically owned by Tenant A (CompanyID = 2) and has a location with LocationID = 15. Because the record is shared using Company Mask, a user logged into Tenant B (CompanyID = 3) can open the supplier and edit the location details. However, when the update is performed, much of the Acumatica framework identifies records using the current tenant context together with the record key. Since LocationID is only unique within a company, the framework may attempt to resolve or update the record in the current tenant instead of the original owner tenant. Similar concerns apply to other related DACs such as Address, Contact, and other vendor-related entities.
This raises several questions:
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How can we reliably identify and update the original owner record when the user is working from a different tenant?
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Is Company Mask intended to support editable shared master data, or is it primarily designed for shared visibility?
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Has anyone successfully implemented fully shared vendor master data across multiple tenants while continuing to use the standard Vendor Maintenance screen?
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Are there any recommended patterns or framework features that support this scenario?
One approach we are considering is to designate a single tenant as the Supplier Management tenant, where all supplier creation, verification, and maintenance take place. The remaining tenants would only read the supplier information, making the management tenant the single source of truth. While this appears to be the safest architectural approach, would like to understand whether there is a supported way to allow updates from any tenant without introducing data consistency issues.
I would appreciate any guidance on the recommended architecture for this type of cross-tenant shared master data scenario.
