Is it possible to have a parent company with subsidiary companies in QuickBooks?

You can have multiple companies within Quickbooks. I'm not sure if all versions operate the same you would want to research that, but you can have multiple companies and just log into them separately. I know Enterprise has the option to combine reports from all companies as well.

Once you have QuickBooks installed, you can create as many company files as you want.

There have been debate and techniques offered in Proformative posts about this. My opinion is to create each one in a separate file and then consolidate reports if needed (I agree with Christie that QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions makes this easiest).

If you want them all in one company file, there are risks but there are techniques to make it as easy as possible. Don't use class tracking, though, because the Balance Sheet by Class feature doesn't work as well as it should.

The best suggested I've heard for an all-on-one approach was shared by Bob Stenz: Create a G/L numbering system and use a prefix to each company. Then when you run reports, use a filter based on that prefix.

Feel free to contact me privately.

Thank you for your comments. I currently have 13 company files and it is difficult to get a big picture without spending hours combining them all in Excel. (I have QB Accountant 2013) We are consolidating the companies into two holding companies with subsidiaries underneath. We are planning to use Class tracking so I appreciate your suggestion, Jaime, to create a G/L system with prefixes for each company. We will be sure to incorporate that into our plan as an extra precautionary step.