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Gary Gochenour's headshot
Gary Gochenour Manager

Can I manage multiple Businesses within QB, with several only for reporting?

Asked on Dec. 5, 2013

Hi, I'm the business manager for a <$10m/yr Home builder, and have 5 companies to manage, all under the same owner. We use QB pro for all accounting. The owner has expressed his wish that the parent company treat its counterparts as contractors, or perhaps more accurately, subcontractors. As he is the owner of these companies, he does not want actual funds to be transferred between them, only to outside vendors and subcontractors. How can I have the reports reflect the imaginary transactions between the companies under his ownership, as well as the outside vendors who are paid as normal within the QB environment? At present, there are 4 company files within QB. Can I simply consolidate and use class tracking and utilize subclasses for each particular worksite? Thank you very very much Gary Gochenour

Answers

Jaime Campbell's headshot
Jaime Campbell Chief Financial Officer • December 6, 2013

If the companies are separate legal entities, I would not merge the books for a number of reasons, the main ones being:

* I am not satisfied with the quality of Balance Sheet class tracking. It is too easy to blur the classes.

* If the IRS wants to conduct an examination for one of the entities, you'll probably end up turning over the books for all 5 companies because they ask for QuickBooks files these days, not just exported of printed G/Ls.

The downside of having separate QB files is that you can only have 2 open simultaneously. However, there are some clever workarounds for this depending on you infrastructure setup.

What I would do is standardize the charts of accounts and set up an Excel file to show the consolidated financial statements. If you set it up correctly, it is a matter of a few minutes at most to update each time.

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