In part 1 of the series, I discussed consolidating reports using QuickBooks® Enterprise’s built-in report combination tool.

In part 2, I am going to focus on using excel to manually export reports and "copy/paste" them to combine them. Even with QuickBooks Enterprise’s built-in function, some people like the control of using this technique. And, if you are using QuickBooks Pro, Premier and/or Accountant, you have no other choice but to use this technique, until you upgrade to QuickBooks Enterprise.

These are the things you need to do to prepare your company files for consolidation:

• Check that accounts that are similarly named, but not exact, get renamed (and merged, if necessary) to have consistent names. **All the same rules from part 1 apply when it comes to names and account numbers!
• Try to use generic categories, and use sub-accounts of specific categories that you are not likely to use in different companies. For example, if you track "Paper/Ink" and "Small Hardware" under one company, but not the other(s), make Paper/Ink and Small Hardware sub-accounts of "Office Supplies," which you are likely to use across all companies.
• When you combine companies, always assume that you will use a COLLAPSED report (in other words, hiding all sub-accounts).
• Try to have the EXACT same chart of accounts (at least with parent accounts) across all files to make the copy/paste consolidation in excel easiest.

For a step-by-step process of the information above, watch this video below:

I am generally pretty good at answering QuickBooks questions via e-mail. If you have a question about combining reports, send me an email: hector@garciacpa.com.