Feature Request: Simplified Workflow for Inter-Business Transactions

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1

Hi everyone,

I am writing to suggest an improvement to the feature for users who manage multiple separate businesses within Manager.

Currently, when one business needs to transfer funds to another (e.g., to cover temporary cash flow constraints or shared expenses), the standard advice is to manually create “Inter-company” liability/asset accounts in both files and record the transactions independently.

While this works from an accounting perspective, it is a high-friction process that is susceptible to errors. Specifically, it is easy for the balances to drift if the “receiving” side isn’t recorded immediately or if there are discrepancies in how it is logged.

The Idea: I propose a simplified workflow—perhaps an “Inter-company Transfer” module that acts similarly to the existing “Inter-account Transfer” feature, but is designed to bridge two separate business files.

Ideally, this would involve:

  1. Standardisation: A specific transaction type that standardises the use of inter-company clearing accounts.

  2. Data Integrity: A way to export/import or “sync” these specific entries between two files to ensure the credit in Business A perfectly matches the debit in Business B, eliminating reconciliation mismatches.

I recognise that these are legally separate entities, but from a management accounting perspective, having a dedicated, error-proof feature for these common inter-company movements would be a massive efficiency gain for users with multiple files.

Has there been any consideration for a more automated approach to this type of cross-entity transaction?

Thanks for all your hard work on the software.

2

Hello @Delta256,

Welcome to the forum.

Unfortunately, there is not a single tab that works accross multiple businesses since separate businesses are separate legal entities as you already noted.

If by any chance these were a single entity, using Divisions would do the trick.

There is a workaround, however, and it requires special set of circumstances in order for it to work.

In case you have a master business and another dependent business, the workaround makes use of a virtual bank account to import the movements from the master business in the form of bank statements.