Running two or more businesses means two or more sets of books. Each company has its own bank accounts, its own sales tax registration and its own tax return, and mixing their transactions is the fastest way to a painful year end. The question isn't whether to keep them apart, but what keeping them apart costs in each tool, and how the receipts and bills for each company end up in the right books.
One disclosure first: we make Smartbills, and Smartbills is not accounting software. It captures receipts and bills and syncs them to QuickBooks, Xero, Sage and FreshBooks. That's why this page doesn't rank the accounting tools. The facts about each one were read on the vendor's own pages in October 2026 and are listed under Sources. Plans change: confirm anything you'd decide on with the vendor.
What to check when you run several businesses
- Price per company. Most small business accounting tools charge one subscription per company file. Three businesses means three subscriptions.
- One login. Whether you can switch between companies without signing out, and give your accountant access to all of them.
- Consolidated reports. A combined income statement and balance sheet across companies, which usually sits on a higher tier.
- Intercompany entries. Recording a loan or a recharge between two of your companies once, on both sides, and eliminating it on consolidation.
- Currencies. If one company is in Canada and another in the US, each set of books needs its own home currency.
- Getting documents to the right company. The receipts and bills for all of them usually land in one inbox and on one person's phone.
QuickBooks Online
Each QuickBooks Online company needs its own paid subscription. Intuit's support team says all of them can be reached with the same login, and you switch between them from the gear menu. For a group that needs consolidated reporting, Intuit's higher-end Intuit Enterprise Suite produces consolidated profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow reports across companies, and handles intercompany journal entries and eliminations from the parent company. Suits: owners whose accountant already works in QuickBooks, with one subscription per business. Smartbills vs QuickBooks.
Xero
Xero's FAQ says you can add as many organisations as you like to your Xero account and choose a pricing plan for each one. It offers a discount when you subscribe to more than one organisation with the same subscriber email address, applied automatically. Suits: owners of several small companies who want one account and a multi-organisation discount. Xero vs QuickBooks Online.
FreshBooks
FreshBooks has a page for multiple businesses that says it keeps each company's transactions separate and offers consolidated financial reports and statements, across locations and currencies. The page doesn't say how pricing works for more than one business: ask FreshBooks before you count on it. Suits: service businesses that invoice clients and want the same tool for each company. FreshBooks vs QuickBooks Online.
Sage Intacct
Sage pitches Sage Intacct for multi-entity accounting: consolidations across entities with different currencies, accounting standards and fiscal periods, and inter-entity transactions recorded on both sides. It is built for finance teams rather than an owner doing their own books, and it's priced through Sage's sales team. Suits: groups with a controller, several entities and a consolidation to produce every month. Sage Accounting vs QuickBooks Online.
When you need QuickBooks plus a capture layer
Picking the ledger settles where the books live. It doesn't settle how the paperwork gets there. With three companies, the hardware store receipt, the software subscription invoice and the phone bill for each one arrive in the same inbox or the same wallet, and someone has to sort them into the right set of books, code them and attach them.
That is the part Smartbills does. One login switches between your businesses, and each business connects to its own QuickBooks, Xero, Sage or FreshBooks file. Receipts come in from email, from photos and sent through Smartbills; supplier bills are fetched from the portals they sit behind. Each one is read down to its tax lines, coded and synced to that business's books with the document attached.
What Smartbills doesn't do: it isn't a general ledger, and it doesn't produce consolidated financial statements or intercompany eliminations. Those stay in your accounting software.
If you were looking for a QuickBooks alternative
Many people search for a QuickBooks alternative when the per-company subscriptions add up, or when the real pain is typing in receipts. They're different problems. If it's the ledger, compare ledgers: Xero, Wave, FreshBooks and Sage each have a fair comparison with QuickBooks Online, and our QuickBooks alternatives page lists more. If it's the data entry, switching ledgers won't fix it: keeping QuickBooks and adding capture usually will.