Multi-company & consolidation

Watch the lesson: Add a second company and switch to it (1:36).

Several entities, each with their own books, adding up to one set of group accounts.

Plan.

Multi-company and consolidation start at Enterprise, which includes 2 companies — as does Manufacturing. Every plan below that is a single company. A module you have unlocked applies to every entity you hold; it is never charged again per company.

First: is this really a second company?

This is the question worth getting right, because the two answers are different features and undoing the wrong one means re-keying your books.

You have	What you want
One registered business with depots, branches, departments or projects — one VAT number, one tax return, one set of statutory books	Cost centres, not a second entity. You get an income statement with a column per branch that reconciles to the company total. See One company, several branches.
Two or more separately registered legal entities — each with its own registration number, its own VAT vendor status and its own return	Multi-company, this guide.

Do not split one business across two entities to get per-branch reporting.

Each entity has its own chart of accounts, its own VAT vendor status and its own books, so doing that means filing one VAT201 from two sets of books — and it costs you an entity allowance you did not need to spend. Cost centres come with Reports, on every plan from Business, and give you the branch report without any of that.

How many entities you can hold

Enterprise and Manufacturing include 2 companies. Company number one is never charged for. If you need a third or more, the Extra company add-on adds one company at a time. It is sold on Enterprise and Manufacturing only, bought in Settings → Billing & Plan — see add-ons. The rate steps down as the group grows:

Entities	Each, a month
3—5	R249
6—12	R199
13—27	R179
28 and beyond	R159

One group can hold up to 100 entities.

The limit is checked when you create an entity, and nowhere else. If you are already over the allowance — because your plan changed, say — nothing is hidden, locked or deleted: you keep every entity and can go on working in all of them. Ledgr only declines to add a new one, and it tells you the figure and how to raise it.

Adding an entity

Multi-Company → Add Entity
Capture it like a company, because it is one
Registered name, registration number, VAT number, financial year end, base currency and its legal form — (Pty) Ltd, close corporation, trust, sole proprietor or NPC. Whether it is a holding company or a subsidiary is not a type: it follows from the next step.
Set the holding company and shareholding
This is what draws the group structure chart and drives which balances get eliminated on consolidation. Leave the holding company blank for a standalone entity.
Decide who works in it
Open the entity and use Access to this entity → Restrict a user. Somebody with no entities listed can work in every entity; the first one you list for them confines them to the entities listed.
Give them a role in it, if it should differ
Each person listed for the entity shows their role there. By default that is their organisation role from Roles & users; pick another from the menu beside their name and it applies whenever they work in this entity — so someone can be an Admin in one entity and a Viewer in another. Choosing a role here needs permission to edit roles. The owner always holds every permission in every entity, and you cannot change your own role.

Switching between entities

The entity switcher sits in the header. Pick an entity and the whole application — dashboard, invoices, reports — scopes to it. Pick Group view and you get the consolidated position. What you are looking at is always named in the header, which matters more than it sounds when you are about to issue an invoice.

Check the entity before you create anything.

A document is created in the entity that is active at the time. Moving one afterwards means voiding it and reissuing in the right place.

Inter-company transactions

When one entity in the group charges another, record it as an inter-company transaction so both sides are linked. Each one carries the entities involved, the amount and the date. The IC balance matrix shows, at a glance, who owes whom across the whole group.

Invoicing another company in the group does this for you. On the customer's contact, set One of your companies to the company they are. When you send them an invoice, Ledgr enters the same invoice in that company's bills — waiting in its supplier invoices for somebody there to accept it, so its books change only when it agrees — and records the inter-company transaction for the invoice total. Voiding the invoice before the other company acts takes both back.

Two separate things then happen to it, and Ledgr keeps them apart on purpose:

Eliminating it is a statement about the group's figures — the amount is out of the consolidated accounts. Its status runs pending → matched (both entities agree the amount) → eliminated.
Recording payment is a statement about cash — the money moved between two bank accounts, on a date, with a reference.

A management fee is routinely eliminated at year end and still unpaid, which is exactly what the matrix exists to show — so one action cannot be made to mean the other. Removing a payment record is always allowed; eliminating cannot be undone by recording a payment, and recording a payment does not take an amount back into the consolidated figures.

"Payment not recorded" is not the same as "unpaid".

Before Ledgr kept the two apart, one button meant both — so for an older transaction it is genuinely unknown whether it was paid. Those read Payment not recorded rather than Unpaid, and they are reported as their own figure rather than folded into either bucket. Nothing was guessed on your behalf.

An amount a finalised consolidation has already eliminated cannot be restated — its figure is in a report somebody has filed. Correct it with a further transaction rather than by editing history.

Consolidation

Group view produces a consolidated income statement and balance sheet with eliminations applied:

Inter-company revenue is eliminated against the matching inter-company expense
Inter-company receivables are eliminated against the matching payables

Which is why the IC log matters — an unrecorded inter-company charge inflates both group revenue and group costs, and the group balance sheet with it.

Shared contacts

The contact database is shared across the group, with a badge per contact showing which entities trade with them. One customer buying from two subsidiaries is one contact with two badges, not two records that drift apart.

Group structure

An org chart showing the holding company and its subsidiaries with connectors and shareholding. Useful for a funder pack, and useful for checking that the parent relationships you captured are the ones you meant.

Common problems

What you see	What to do
"You have used every company your plan includes"	You are at the company allowance for your plan. Company one is free on every plan; on Enterprise and Manufacturing the Extra company add-on adds the next, on the graduated rate above. Nothing is hidden or deleted if you are already over an allowance — the limit is checked when you create.
A button works in one entity and is missing in another	The person has a different role in each. Their role in the entity you are looking at is shown under Access to this entity; the app redraws its controls when you switch entity.
"A company cannot be its own parent"	And a group may not nest more than a few levels deep. Both refusals exist because a cycle in the group structure would make consolidation impossible to calculate.
"from and to companies must be different"	An inter-company transaction is between two entities. A single company owing itself money is a journal, not an IC transaction.
An eliminated transaction will not restate	Elimination has already moved a figure in a report somebody may have filed, so the amount is fixed from that point. Matching is freely reversible; elimination is not.
An amount is eliminated but still shows as owed	That is correct and it is the point of the balance matrix. Elimination is a consolidation fact — the amount is out of the group's combined figures. Settlement is a cash fact — the money moved between two bank accounts. A management fee is routinely eliminated at year end and still unpaid.
An old transaction says "Payment not recorded"	Before settlement had its own columns, one button meant both things — so no payment date does not mean unpaid, it means nobody recorded one. Record it if the money did move; removing a payment record is always allowed.
"This consolidation group is already finalised"	Create a new group to re-consolidate. A finalised group is the record of what was reported, so re-running it in place would change a figure that has been read.
Consolidated figures look too high	Inter-company revenue and expenses only drop out once the transactions are eliminated. Matched is two people agreeing an amount; eliminated is the instruction to take it out of the group.
A contact appears under the wrong entity	Contacts are shared across entities on purpose, with a per-entity badge. What is per-entity is the trading — the invoices, the balance and the credit position.