Running multiple businesses or locations at once is a challenge, but the right accounting software can simplify your finances without sacrificing control and visibility. When you use multi-entity accounting software, you should be able to see the financial breakdowns for each unique entity, plus the overall performance of all locations combined.
What is multi-entity accounting software?
Multi-entity accounting software enables you to manage multiple locations or businesses from one platform, helping you to streamline approvals and payments without losing visibility into your financial data.
Implementing controls and payment security is extremely important for multi-entity organizations since upper management is less involved in each location's day-to-day operations.
Finding software that allows you to review the financial reporting for each location separately ensures that your company is protected against internal and external fraud attempts, such as duplicate or fraudulent invoices.
This allows your finance team to have insights into multiple entities, both separately and collectively, so you can make informed business decisions and strategize for future growth. Having both separate overviews and consolidated financial statements helps you monitor the financial health of your business so you can make informed business decisions.
Multi-entity capabilities to look for in accounting software
These are the top 3 features to look for in multi-entity accounting software: customizable workflows, the ability to separate different locations or entities, and bird’s eye and granular views.
1. Customizable workflows
When evaluating the best multi-entity software for your business, the primary thing you should look for is customization. Running multi-entity companies requires intense oversight, and being able to customize your approval workflows is essential. One of the best ways to ensure control is to create different approval levels.
For example, you can set payments of over $5,000 dollars to require the approval of a second store manager, and approvals of over $10,000 to require the approval of a district manager. If you’re a BILL customer, all comments and approvals are logged and timestamped within for future reference, so you can do periodic audits of financial data and ensure the approval process runs smoothly. Regardless of what thresholds and approvers you choose, it’s essential to build a workflow that grants oversight without overwhelming your managers.
2. The ability to separate different locations or entities
The right accounting software can even help you manage multiple locations with one central team. For example, BILL customer Millennium Physicians manages almost 40 physical locations with one AP team, giving their head office oversight without encroaching on the independence of each practice.
“We're a multi-specialty medical group, so even though we're one tax ID, we operate at financially independent practices within the group. Then everything consolidates into one set of financials, but each one of those independent practices has their own bank account. So really we have 33 financially independent practices to keep track of.” - Christopher Hopeck , CFO at Millennium Physicians
Using BILL, Millenium Physicians creates a unique email for each practice so the invoices can be emailed to the correct set of books. Then, their central team reviews the accounts to ensure nothing is missed. The best multi-entity accounting software will allow you to customize your policies and workflows to fit the unique needs of your business.
3. Bird’s eye and granular views
The best multi-entity accounting software will allow you to get a granular view of each location and a bird’s eye view of your performance across all sites. Having this data at your fingertips helps you make the overarching business decisions like hiring, offering new services, or opening additional locations.
Software offerings like QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, and Oracle NetSuite all offer robust dashboards that are perfect for gleaning data-driven insights across multiple entities, while still providing a shared general ledger that provides top-level financial reporting.
The best accounting software with multi-entity capabilities
It’s essential to choose accounting software that allows you to create separate instances and policies for each location, while still maintaining a birds’ eye view of spending overall.
Fortunately, there are accounting softwares with features designed to help you run multiple locations from one central hub, and these options include QuickBooks, Xero, Sage Intacct, and NetSuite.
QuickBooks
You can have as many companies as you'd like under the same QuickBooks Online account, which makes it easy to manage multiple entities. While each company requires an additional subscription, you can access them with the same sign-in info to quickly toggle between your locations and manage everything cohesively. If you have multiple companies under one account, you’ll be asked to pick which company you want to evaluate upon sign-in.
Xero
Xero also allows you to have multiple businesses under one login, with each entity requiring its own subscription. This multi-company function allows you to view the separate accounting and outstanding tasks for each location, all while keeping the organizations distinct.
Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct provides one of the leading solutions for multi entity companies, with the ability to view both the unique and consolidated views. Sage’s multi-entity insights provides aggregated reporting and an umbrella view that helps you see the combined performance of all of your entities, then click into the individual businesses to see their unique insights. This deep financial reporting allows you to look for ways to optimize and scale, helping you strategize for future growth.
NetSuite
NetSuite offers multi-entity and multi-book accounting capabilities, which they combine with real-time data to provide a comprehensive overview of business performance. NetSuite also features the ability to create custom charts of different regions or subsets of locations so you can make informed business decisions as you scale and grow.
How to choose the best multi-entity accounting software for your business
Choosing the best multi-entity accounting software is crucial to managing the complexities of your operations. Whether setting different approval thresholds or managing multiple financial accounts, a few key capabilities are essential to maintaining control and visibility every step of the way.
1. Look for customizability
The most important feature for any multi entity accounting software is the ability to customize it to your needs. It’s essential that your settings, approval workflows, and administrative needs can shift as your business scales, so look for a solution that allows you to pivot in the future.
2. Evaluate reporting options
To make informed business decisions about your entities, you’ll need all possible financial data at your fingertips. This helps you make decisive actions like hiring, offering new services, or opening additional locations. You’ll want access to robust dashboards to glean data-driven insights across multiple entities, along with a shared general ledger that shows your overall performance.
3. Explore pricing
This is one of the biggest pain points for multi-entity businesses, as software providers typically charge for each separate business. You should also look closely at whether they charge per user, because this can become quite expensive when you need approvers at each location. But despite the costs, having easy access to financial data and the increased control is often worth it for teams that have to manage multiple locations at once.
4. Integrations
For a complete financial picture, it’s important to integrate your accounting software with other financial tools that will help your business save time. Consider what tax, accounts payable, and expense reporting softwares you already use and ensure that your new selection integrates seamlessly with your tech stack. For example, if you’re already a BILL user, all of the software options listed in this article already integrate seamlessly to help you save time and reduce manual errors.
5. Additional resources
Running multiple entities is a delicate balancing act, and additional education can help your team master your processes. Look for a provider with ongoing education or even a master class that can help your team understand the complexities of your new multi entity accounting software!
Level up financial operations for multi-entity organizations
Your multi-entity accounting software is just one piece of the financial puzzle for multi-entity businesses. The complete package comes when you have accounting, financial automation, and spend management software all working in perfect harmony. BILL provides both AP automation software to help you manage larger purchases via invoices, as well as corporate cards to manage day-to-day spending and expense management.
You can assign budgets by location or create separate categories to prevent entities from overspending, and the app logs receipts by category or department for future review. All of these tools provide the perfect blend of control and visibility to help your business manage separate locations without losing focus on the big financial picture.
Ready to optimize your financial operations with the right multi-entity accounting software? Demo BILL to see how to manage multiple locations from one single platform.