2 businesses on 1 company?

[JKCeurope]

Hello there fellow sage 50 users!

I am new to this forum, and pretty new to Sage 50!
I have a company under name JKC Europe Limited, which is running 2 businesses under one name.
The 1st business is shop-fitting (contractors) and the 2nd business is manufacturing industrial lifting bags.

I have sage 50 accounts 2011,and would like to ask if i should run the 2 businesses separately on sage or can i have both of them on one sage company.

I will explain the nature of my business and how it works, and i would really appreciate if somebody could guide me in the right direction of how to process everything.

Shop-fitting:
We are contractors, and our "suppliers" are sub-contractors, people we pay to work for us as self-employed and our "customers" contractors which pay us.
Every week, each subcontractor will send in their invoices for the works carried out which we have to pay for. We enter these invoices into "invoice" and "credit" due to the fact that we keep the CIS (20%) to our selves which we then later on pay to HMRC at the end of the month. We then need to send out to our sub-contractors monthly statements, which i hope sage will help automate this process.

Manufacturing:
We manufacture industrial lifting bags, and enter these bags into products on sage, later on we sell these bags and send out pro-forma, invoices etc. which i think i know how to do on sage.

The real question is, can i run 2 businesses on 1 sage company? Or will that interfere with things and would be suggested to keep them separate?

Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Tomas

[brucedenney]

There is no reason not to run them both from the one sage accounts.

The only issue you may face is with customer/supplier facing documents where you may want to change logos and trading names on invoices/sales orders statements etc.

If you have one bank account and one VAT registration then separating them creates a lot of headaches.

If you have 2 bank accounts and separate vat registrations then splitting them is viable, the main benefit being if you are looking to legally separate the businesses eg to sell one off in the future, then having a separate set of accounts may have some value.