Introduction: The QuickBooks Challenge for Multi-Entity Companies
QuickBooks is widely used by small to mid-sized businesses for its user-friendliness, affordability, and rich feature set. It helps companies manage bookkeeping, invoicing, payroll, and taxes efficiently. However, as businesses scale and operate across multiple entities—whether due to expansion, acquisitions, or international operations—they often run into a major reporting challenge: consolidation.
QuickBooks (both Online and Desktop versions) is built to manage the accounting of a single company. It does not natively support the generation of consolidated financial statements across multiple entities, meaning you cannot directly create a unified Profit & Loss Statement, Balance Sheet, or Cash Flow report.
In this article, we’ll explore:
- Why consolidated reporting is essential for growing businesses
- The limitations of using QuickBooks alone for consolidation
- How to consolidate QuickBooks data with a tool like BrizoSystem
- A practical step-by-step guide to get started
Why Consolidation Is Essential
If your business structure includes more than one entity—such as subsidiaries in different countries, legal companies under a holding group, or joint ventures—you need to understand your overall group performance. Consolidated reports help you:
- Present a complete picture to management, boards, or investors
- Comply with international accounting standards (IFRS, US GAAP)
- Eliminate intercompany transactions to avoid double-counting
- Combine financials across currencies and charts of accounts
- Streamline budgeting and forecasting for the group
Without proper consolidation, reporting remains fragmented, inaccurate, and inefficient.
The Manual Workaround in QuickBooks
In QuickBooks, each entity is treated as a standalone company file (or subscription in QuickBooks Online). There is no built-in function to merge or consolidate these company files. As a result, most businesses resort to Excel, manually:
- Exporting reports for each company
- Mapping accounts to a group-wide chart
- Performing currency conversions
- Removing intercompany sales or loans
- Consolidating numbers in spreadsheets
This is not only time-consuming, but also introduces version control issues, audit risks, and a heavy reliance on Excel formulas and macros. It becomes harder to drill down into source transactions, track changes, or explain variances—especially as your group grows.
A Better Way: Use BrizoSystem to Consolidate QuickBooks Entities
BrizoSystem offers a seamless solution for companies using QuickBooks Online who need multi-entity consolidation. By connecting your QuickBooks accounts to BrizoSystem, you can:
- Pull real-time financial data from multiple entities
- Create and maintain a common chart of accounts (CCOA)
- Convert currencies using your preferred exchange rates
- Perform intercompany elimination entries
- Generate professional consolidated reports and dashboards
This helps remove the friction from your monthly or quarterly reporting process and allows you to move beyond spreadsheets entirely.
Step-by-Step: Consolidating QuickBooks Data with BrizoSystem
Step 1: Connect Your QuickBooks Companies
Start by linking each QuickBooks Online organisation to BrizoSystem. The integration is secure and automated—once connected, BrizoSystem syncs trial balances, account lists, journals, and even invoices.
Step 2: Create a Common Chart of Accounts
Since each company may have its own naming or coding structure, you’ll need to map them to a group-level chart in BrizoSystem. For example:
- “Rent Expense” in Company A
- “Office Rental” in Company B
→ Both can be mapped to “Group: Rental Expenses”
This creates consistency across all entities, which is crucial for consolidation.
Step 3: Set Exchange Rates
For entities using different currencies, BrizoSystem allows you to set up monthly average, closing, or fixed exchange rates. This ensures that your group reports can be produced in a single reporting currency, aligned with your internal or external reporting requirements.
Step 4: Perform Intercompany Eliminations
BrizoSystem offers two elimination methods:
- Group-Level Input: Enter adjustments directly at the consolidation layer
- Subsidiary-Level Input: Select the “From” and “To” entities and BrizoSystem handles the corresponding debit/credit entries
You can eliminate items like:
- Intercompany sales and purchases
- Loans and advances
- Dividend income
- Management or service fees
- Unrealized profit in inventory or fixed assets
This ensures your consolidated reports reflect only third-party activities.
Step 5: Generate Consolidated Reports
Once everything is mapped and eliminations are in place, you can instantly generate reports such as:
- Consolidated Profit & Loss
- Consolidated Balance Sheet
- KPI Dashboards
- Cash Summary and Forecast
- Insight Reports with comments and visuals
You can also schedule these to be delivered automatically in PDF format, or package them into Insight Packages for board meetings.
Example: A Multi-Country Business Using QuickBooks
Imagine your company has:
- Company A (US) in USD
- Company B (UK) in GBP
- Company C (AU) in AUD
Each operates on QuickBooks Online. At month-end, your CFO needs a group-level P&L in USD, eliminating intercompany transfers between UK and AU, and consolidating results with proper currency conversion.
With BrizoSystem:
- You sync all three entities
- Map to a standard chart
- Use exchange rates (e.g., 1 GBP = 1.25 USD)
- Eliminate intercompany fees
- Generate and send a report within minutes
All this happens without exporting a single Excel file.
Key Benefits of Consolidating QuickBooks with BrizoSystem
- Real-time data – no more outdated spreadsheets
- Standardised reports – consistency across all entities
- Audit trail – keep track of eliminations and changes
- Custom visuals – charts, highlights, and commentary
- Flexible reporting views – by region, product line, or custom groups
Whether you’re a small group with three companies or a growing enterprise with 10+, BrizoSystem scales with you.
Conclusion: QuickBooks Is Great — But Not for Group Reporting Alone
QuickBooks is excellent for managing individual entities, but when it comes to consolidated group financials, it’s not built for the job. Manual workarounds might suffice at first, but they quickly become inefficient and unreliable.
With a consolidation platform like BrizoSystem, you can:
- Automate and standardise consolidation
- Eliminate manual errors
- Save days of work each month
- Deliver reports with confidence
If you’re a QuickBooks user managing multiple entities, it’s time to stop patching together spreadsheets and start consolidating like a pro.
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