>This question maybe in the realm of best practices in regards to developing software / applications for small business owners. I have a client who has multiple small businesses and requested an application that would be able to handle multiple businesses and the customers and products associated with them.
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>What is everyone's opinon on being faced with this sort of request? My initial thoughts are to allow the user to register (for the first time upon installing), and then figuring out a way to force the user to create xx number of business profiles. Is this good practice? Any recommendations on doing this or NOT doing this?

When starting at first, you would probably want to determine the highest entity which will be tied into the system. In this case, it appears to be, as you mentioned, a Business table. To ease the administration, you would probably want your client to only has one login with an easy switch in regards to which business he wants to administer or monitor from an easy access somewhere in a menu, on top, etc.

We have something similar in here. A user can use the top menu to switch the language interface as he wishes. The Settings option in the top menu allows that. You can see there is a selected indicator to indicate into which interface language he is. Something like that could apply for a client selection I guess.

Then, this overall filter would then apply along all the required options. Some systems are using a different login for each of them. This is somewhat irritating for users who wishes to switch from one to another at several occasions.