Managing multiple entities from one platform

Once a startup grows past a single company, finances get fragmented fast: a holding company, an operating subsidiary or two, maybe a separate entity for a new market. Each one has its own balances, its own customers and its own suppliers, and keeping them straight across separate logins quickly becomes a chore.

This guide covers how to run several entities from one platform without blurring the lines between them, so each company stays clearly separate while you keep an overall view of the group.

Running a holding company and subsidiaries from one login

The aim is to manage every entity in the group from a single place, while keeping each one financially distinct. Rather than juggling separate logins and chasing balances across them, you sign in once and move between entities as needed.

This is particularly useful for the holding-and-subsidiaries shape that startups tend to grow into: a parent company that owns one or more operating businesses. Each entity keeps its own identity and its own money, but the people running the group are not switching between disconnected setups to see what is going on.

Separate balances and sub-accounts per entity or project

Keeping money separate is the foundation. Each entity should have its own balances, so funds belonging to one company are never mixed with another's. The same approach is handy below the entity level too:

• Per entity — each company in the group holds its own balances, kept distinct from the others.
• Per project or cost centre — within an entity, sub-accounts let you ring-fence money for a specific project, market or campaign, which makes tracking and reconciliation far simpler.

Clear separation now saves a great deal of untangling later, especially when an accountant or an investor needs to see exactly what belongs to which company.

A consolidated cash view across entities and currencies

Separation is only half the picture. As the person running the group, you also need to see the whole at a glance: how much cash sits across every entity, and across every currency you hold.

A consolidated view brings those balances together so you can answer the question every founder eventually faces — how much runway does the group actually have — without exporting and adding up balances by hand. Seeing entities and currencies side by side also makes it easier to spot when one company is short while another is sitting on idle cash.

Separate account details so people pay the right company

Each entity should have its own account details to receive money. This matters for more than tidiness:

• Customers pay the company they actually contracted with, which keeps your revenue attributed to the right entity.
• Suppliers and partners can be set up against the correct company, reducing reconciliation headaches.
• Your records line up cleanly per entity, which is exactly what an accountant or a reviewer expects to see.

Mixing receipts across entities is one of the more painful things to unwind, so giving each company its own details from the start is well worth it.

Scoped access per entity

Not everyone needs to see everything. Scoped access lets you decide which people can view or act on which entity, so a team member working on one subsidiary is not looking at the finances of the whole group.

This keeps information on a need-to-know basis and keeps responsibilities clear: the people running a given entity have what they need for that entity, while group-level visibility stays with the founders or finance leads who require it. As the group grows, this scoping is what stops one shared login from becoming a single point of risk.

Frequently asked questions