When using the ‘Merge Organization’ functionality in TAS to mirror a real-life acquisition or merger between two companies, BBEC automatically creates a relationship between the primary and secondary organizations once the merge is complete. The relationship is Parent Corporation / Subsidiary and it has a Start Date equal to the date of the merger/acquisitions. It also adds new Parent History to the Organization History tab with the same Start Date.

While in some real-life acquisitions, the ‘secondary’ organization does continue to function and essentially just ‘changes parent organizations’, that is not the point of this functionality in BBEC. The secondary organization is absorbed by the primary organization and marked inactive. Anything on the secondary organization after the merger date is moved to the primary organization. In order to show changing parent corporations, we could/would simply add or update a relationship.

It does not make sense to automatically create a new relationship using those types, and it certainly should not have a start date equal to the date the secondary organization ceased to exist and its record marked inactive. In addition, both the parent history and relationship start dates often cause problems down the road if further merges are performed using the primary organization.   Part of maintaining the org data in our system involves [corporate] merging orgs in our db using the date that those same mergers actually happened in real-life.  Most times the real-life mergers have already happened for these orgs before we are aware of them so that’s why we need to “back-date” the merger.

I am suggesting that this functionality gets tweaked so that new start dates are not automatically added to a record at the same time it is marked inactive, and that the secondary organization does not have the primary organization marked as its ‘current parent’.