The QuickBooks Scaling Problem: Drowning in Multiple Company Files
For any business with subsidiaries, franchises, or multiple locations, a familiar frustration emerges. You start with one QuickBooks file, then add a second, then a fifth. Soon, your finance team is spending countless hours just logging in and out of different accounts, exporting data to Excel, and manually “stitching data together” to create consolidated reports. This process is not only “time-consuming and painful,” but it’s also a breeding ground for errors that can lead to flawed business decisions.
You need a single source of truth. You need to see what’s happening across your entire business without the manual work. This is the core scaling problem that Intuit Enterprise Suite (IES) was built to solve.
One Platform, One Login, a Complete View
IES transforms multi-entity accounting from a chaotic, fragmented process into a streamlined, centralized operation. It is tailor-made for multi-entity companies.
Here’s what makes its multi-entity management unique:
- Single Sign-In for All Entities: Instead of juggling dozens of logins, you use one login to access a single dashboard. From there, you can switch between your parent company and all subsidiaries using a simple dropdown menu.
- Support for up to 100 Entities: The platform is built to scale with you, allowing you to manage up to 100 distinct entities under one suite.
- Standardized Chart of Accounts (COA): You can implement a standardized COA across your entire portfolio. This ensures financial data is categorized consistently, making consolidated reporting clean, simple, and accurate.
- Centralized User Management: From the main dashboard, you can manage roles and permissions for users across every entity, ensuring tight security and control.
Example: A Construction Firm with Six Subsidiaries
Imagine a regional construction firm, “Keystone Builders,” that has a parent company and five subsidiaries, each specializing in a different area (e.g., residential, commercial, plumbing, electrical, and materials supply).
Before IES, Keystone’s controller spent the first week of every month manually pulling trial balances from six different QBO files to build a consolidated balance sheet. Answering a simple question like, “What was our total payroll expense last month across the entire company?” required a full day of work.
With IES and a partner like Out of the Box Technology, the transition is transformative. OOTB helps Keystone:
- Migrate all six QuickBooks files into a single IES instance.
- Consolidate and Standardize the COA, ensuring an “equipment rental” expense at the commercial subsidiary is coded the same way as at the residential one.
- Set Up Consolidated Reporting, creating a unified dashboard that shows a real-time view of the entire group’s financials.
Now, the controller can run a consolidated P&L in seconds. The CEO can see a real-time cash balance for the entire portfolio with one click.
The Magic of Automated Intercompany Eliminations
A critical component of multi-entity accounting is managing intercompany transactions—the financial exchanges that happen between your entities. For example, Keystone’s materials supply subsidiary sells drywall to its residential construction subsidiary.
Without a proper system, this activity can artificially inflate both revenue (for the seller) and expenses (for the buyer) on a consolidated report. The solution is “intercompany eliminations,” and IES automates this entire process.
- When you create intercompany transactions and journal entries, IES automatically flags them.
- When you run a consolidated report, IES includes automatic eliminations for these transactions.
- This ensures your consolidated P&L and Balance Sheet are accurate, reflecting only transactions with external parties and providing a true picture of the company’s overall performance.
Workflow Example: Consolidated P&L by Business Unit
The CFO of Keystone Builders wants to see not only the consolidated profit and loss but also the profitability of each subsidiary.
Using IES, she can run a single report: Consolidated Profit & Loss by Dimension. She has set up each subsidiary as a “Business Unit” dimension. The report instantly shows her:
- Total consolidated revenue and expenses for the entire Keystone group (with intercompany sales eliminated).
- A side-by-side P&L for each of the six subsidiaries.
This gives her immediate insight into which business units are driving growth and which may need more attention, all from a single, reliable report.
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQ: What entities count toward my IES limit? The Intuit Enterprise Suite platform includes one entity in its base configuration. From there, you can add and pay for additional entities, up to a total of 100. Every legal entity you manage within the suite, including the parent company and each subsidiary, counts as one entity toward this limit.
Ready to Simplify Your Multi-Entity Setup?
If you’re ready to stop juggling logins and spreadsheets, it’s time to see how Intuit Enterprise Suite can bring clarity and control to your organization.
Talk to an OOTB consultant today to simplify your multi-entity accounting.
