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Best Accounting Software for Multiple Businesses

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The GoCardless content team comprises a group of subject-matter experts in multiple fields from across GoCardless. The authors and reviewers work in the sales, marketing, legal, and finance departments. All have in-depth knowledge and experience in various aspects of payment scheme technology and the operating rules applicable to each. The team holds expertise in the well-established payment schemes such as UK Direct Debit, the European SEPA scheme, and the US ACH scheme, as well as in schemes operating in Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand. See full bio

Last editedNov 20222 min read

If you’re juggling multiple businesses at once, you’ll need accounting software that’s up to the challenge. You’ll need to comply with all legal and tax obligations while accurately tracking income and expenses for each entity. Here are our choices of the best accounting software for multiple businesses.

Features of the best accounting software for multiple businesses

When do you need accounting software that can support multiple businesses? Multi-entity companies are those that have majority shares in other companies with accompanying voting rights. This might be due to mergers, acquisitions, or establishing international branches of the same company with a different business structure.

In addition to multi-entity companies, some individuals simply own more than one small business and need to keep separate books for each one. No matter the reason, there are unique accounting needs that arise when you have multiple businesses.

Bank account reconciliation: While this feature is always useful in accounting software, it’s particularly important for multiple business accounts. You should be able to automatically sync accounts with your software.
File sharing: If you’re dealing with a variety of stakeholders, you’ll need to be able to share files as needed with customers, suppliers, vendors, and managers of different branches.
Financial reporting: Multi-entity companies will need to generate consolidated financial statements, which is something that not every accounting software can handle. The best software gives you a clear overview of all of your businesses.
Invoice generation: Look for software that automatically generates and tracks invoices after they’re sent to customers.

1. Zoho Books

Our first choice for the best accounting software for multiple businesses is Zoho Books. It’s a scalable, cloud-based software suitable for small businesses and large enterprises alike. Features include unlimited invoice tracking, expense management, and accounting reports. It’s shareable with outside professionals so that you can get advice from your accountant or bookkeeper. Zoho lets you reconcile multiple credit cards and bank accounts. It’s also fully integrable with the suite of Zoho products, including Zoho Inventory, Zoho CRM, and others.

2. Sage 50cloud

Sage offers a full range of products to suit varying business sizes and budgets. At its higher tiers of pricing, it allows you to open and consolidate unlimited companies. Advanced features include project tracking across multiple projects, including job costing for more accurate billing. Sage 50cloud offers over 150 customisable reports across multiple industries, which you can generate at a click. However, if you use cryptocurrency one thing to note is that this isn’t automatically tracked like other transactions.

3. Intuit QuickBooks

QuickBooks has developed a series of products suitable for online and desktop formats. It’s one of the best accounting software for multiple businesses because you can account for unlimited companies with a single licence. Users gain access to an independent network of QuickBooks Pro Advisors for outside support. Track and categorise expenses, while managing projects from a central dashboard. One downside is that QuickBooks doesn’t consolidate financial statements like some others on this list.

How to choose the best accounting software for multiple businesses

As you can see, managing the accounts for multiple businesses can be complex. The accounting software above is up to the task, but be sure to compare fees, features, and user support carefully. You should also look at third-party integrations.

GoCardless partners with all accounting software mentioned in this article, along with over 350 other systems you probably already work with. Provide secure payments to your customers using direct debit and Instant Bank Pay solutions. This lets you take recurring and one-off payments from customers, recording all transactions directly into your accounting system for accuracy. Give your business full visibility across multiple entities and branches, all managed from a central dashboard.

We can help

GoCardless is a global payments solution that helps you automate payment collection, cutting down on the amount of financial admin your team needs to deal with. Find out how GoCardless can help you with one-off or recurring payments.