Running two companies in QuickBooks Online

How do you run two companies in QuickBooks Online?

You give each one its own company and its own subscription. If you own a coffee shop and a consulting business, or a holding company and two operating companies, each one gets its own books and its own bill. One Intuit login opens all of them, and you switch from one to the next.

Two Plus subscriptions list at $280 a month and give you no combined report. The cheapest way to keep separate books and still see both in one report inside QuickBooks Online is an Advanced company plus a Simple Start company, $378 a month at list price.

Prices are Intuit’s US list prices before promotions, checked October 31, 2026. Intuit was offering 50% off the first three months that day.

Why does QuickBooks Online charge for each company?

QuickBooks Online treats a company as the container for one set of books, and the subscription is attached to that container. Intuit’s own support team puts it this way: each company file you create has its own paid subscription, and you sign in to all of them with the same login.

That keeps each business cleanly apart, which matters when they are separate legal entities. It also means the books have no idea of a group of related businesses under one owner. Advanced adds a group at the reporting step, in Spreadsheet Sync. Intuit sells the full idea, with intercompany eliminations and consolidated reporting, as a different product, Intuit Enterprise Suite. Inside QuickBooks Online, the separation is the point and also the limit.

Can you use classes or locations instead of a second company?

Some owners do. They run both businesses inside one subscription and tag every transaction with a class or location. It saves a subscription. It also mixes two businesses in one set of books, which is a problem the moment the businesses are legally separate or a bank asks for statements for just one of them. If they’re separate LLCs, bookkeeping for multiple LLCs shows what each one records when money moves between them.

There’s a ceiling, too. Simple Start and Essentials don’t have classes or locations at all. Plus allows 40 classes and locations combined. Only Advanced removes the cap.

The other common fix is a bookkeeper who exports each company’s reports and adds them up in a spreadsheet every month. It works on any plan. You pay a person to do the step the software skips.

Xero^™ works the same way: you choose a pricing plan for each organization. Its US multi-organization discount began to be phased out on October 1, 2026, according to Insightful Accountant, though Xero’s own FAQ still mentions it. Don’t count on Xero making a second business cheaper. The Xero vs QuickBooks comparison covers where they do differ.

Can QuickBooks Online combine reports from two companies?

On Advanced, yes, in a spreadsheet. Spreadsheet Sync lets an Advanced admin put companies in a group and pull a combined profit and loss, balance sheet or trial balance. The other companies in the group can be on Simple Start, Essentials or Plus.

Accounts combine only when the name, type and level match in every company. A different spelling or account number keeps them apart, so the charts of accounts need to line up. Intuit’s help articles on it say nothing about eliminations, so what the companies owe each other comes out by hand (Intuit help, updated August 2026, checked October 31, 2026). You still pay for each company, and one of them has to be on Advanced, listed at $340 a month.

Put a year on it. Say you run a coffee shop and a consulting business, each on Plus. That lists at $3,360 a year. To get the combined report, you move the coffee shop to Advanced and the consulting business to Simple Start. That lists at $4,536 a year, $1,176 more. And the consulting business drops to one user with no classes or locations, because that is what Simple Start includes.

Taking out what the companies sold or lent each other is the step that turns a sum into consolidated statements. How to consolidate several companies in QuickBooks walks through it with numbers. For what each plan costs and how the prices got there, see QuickBooks Online pricing in 2026.

When do two businesses need separate books?

Often. The IRS keeps two businesses apart even when one person owns both. Its instructions for Schedule C say to fill out a separate Schedule C for each business you owned. Each one needs its own income and expenses to fill that form out, and separate books give you those numbers.

Keeping the businesses separate is right. The cost is the problem: a full subscription each, and the top plan to see the group in one report.

For what separate books with one combined view looks like in practice, see the multi-entity section of the product page.

Is there a simpler setup for two businesses?

What most owners of two businesses want is both at once. Each business has its own clean books, and one place shows how the group is doing. That is a choice a tool makes in how it is built. You can’t get it by adding tags. Imprest builds it in on its Scaling plan, turned on from Settings. Each entity balances on its own, and reports show one entity or all of them added up. For the day-to-day entries between the businesses, see bookkeeping for multiple LLCs.

Plan prices are on the pricing page.