How To Combine Multiple QuickBooks Files For Reporting

You’re a CEO. You wish to know the response to a simple financial question, e.g. last month’s revenue. However, if for example the company is of decent size, it is probable that the accounting team uses multiple QuickBooks company files to record your computer data. This could be for many reasons:

Your organization has several legal entities, perhaps through acquisitions, and you also maintain separate books for every single legal entity.
Your organization is large enough that you would exceed the transaction limits in one single QuickBooks file.
Your accounting team did a historical migration or change of processes, and now uses an innovative new file.
Any of these would end up in having multiple QuickBooks files – which will be the outcome for approximately 1 / 2 of InsightSquared’s customers.

Here’s the situation: when you have multiple QuickBooks files, you simply can't use QuickBooks to obtain consolidated reporting across every one of them. In addition, you cannot merge them via QuickBooks.

Here are 3 possible solutions.

1. Upgrade to QuickBooks Enterprise Edition
intuit quickbook
Quickbooks Enterprise Solutions could be the highest edition in Intuit’s product suite. Pricing starts at $999 with +$575 per additional user. Right away that’s one disadvantage of this strategy: it’s more than 4x the price of Quickbooks Pro.

QuickBooks Enterprise can simply combine data to make the following reports:

Balance Sheet Standard
Balance Sheet Summary
P&L Standard
Statement of money Flows
Trial Balance
P&L by Class
Here’s the problem: imagine if you want to do other styles of financial analysis in the combined company data? For instance, what if you need to know which customers are late in paying you (Accounts Receivable) across all elements of your organization?

Upgrading to QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions only gets you an extremely limited group of cross-entity reporting. If you like robust reporting, Intuit recommends you move on to solution # 2 below…

2. Export to Excel
excel
Most Intuit customers, so far, will have to do this option.

Export the raw data from a business file into a worksheet in Microsoft Excel.
Repeat # 1 for every company file. Intuit recommends you place each company file into a different sheet.
Then, combine the worksheets into a single consolidated worksheet and run analysis on that. We advice that you have an extra index column indicating the foundation company file for later troubleshooting just in case the merge does not happen perfectly.
Of course, this process has a boatload of problems:

You are manually assembling and manipulating the info, which creates the possibility of a person error.
Excel has row limits. Dependent on what you are actually exporting (all transactions?) you might hit these limits whenever you assemble across all entities. Even if you don’t hit the row limits you might hit your computer’s memory limits.
Manually refreshing data is cumbersome. Each time you like to glance at company financials you ought to bother your accountant to export and re-assemble the data. Thus you may either suffer old data, or waste a lot of time on manual refreshes.
Where’s the insight? This export process will create a lot of data, but very raw data. You then need certainly to assemble it, do the addition and subtractions, do the date range calculations, etc. Even then, may very well not have truly insightful reports which help you run your organization better.
All the above reasons are true of reporting as a whole. Excel is good for ad-hoc analysis but is not good at ongoing reporting.

If you'd like consistent, reliable, ongoing reporting of Financial data across multiple entities, Intuit recommends # 3 below…

3. Combine in an Analytics Application
In 2011-2012 Intuit launched its Marketplace for 3rd-party software. Apps in this marketplace can (together with your authorization) do things together with your sync’d financial data.

In a Marketplace seek out “How To Combine QuickBooks Reports,” there was one application which will combine several files into one. However, it only provides combined P&L and Balance Sheet reports. This might be cheaper than buying QB Enterprise Solutions but a lot more limited — you don’t get combined data for just about any other financial reporting you might need.

Another approach is to use an analytics platform like InsightSquared that will read multiple company files when compiling financial analysis.