QuickBooks Online holds one company per subscription, so a practice with twelve client files has twelve subscriptions, twelve files to switch between, and twelve places to fetch the same five numbers. This guide covers what that costs as of September 2026, what QuickBooks Online Accountant changes about it, and how to run one weekly pass across every client book from a single conversation. Reconciliation and judgment stay where they are, with you.
Can you have multiple companies in QuickBooks Online?
Yes. QuickBooks Online supports as many companies as you need, but each company file requires its own separate paid subscription. Intuit's help article on adding a company is explicit about it: you start from the QuickBooks Online pricing page, choose a plan for the new company, and when asked "Adding a company to an existing account?" you sign in with the user ID you already use. Both files then sit under one login, and you switch between them from Settings, under Switch company. The data stays entirely separate; only the sign-in is shared. Accounting professionals get a different arrangement. QuickBooks Online Accountant is free for a licensed firm and holds every client file you have been invited to in one client list. It does not make the client subscriptions free. Somebody still pays for each one, either the client directly or the firm through wholesale billing.
Do accountants get QuickBooks Online for free?
The firm's own copy, yes. As of September 2026, Intuit's Canadian accountant pricing page says plainly that QuickBooks Online Accountant is "free for your firm" and that you "just pay to add clients". The free subscription is time-limited by its own terms and requires that you be an active, licensed public accountant, which Intuit reserves the right to check.
What comes with it is more than a client list. The same page gives the firm a free QuickBooks Online Advanced subscription for its own books, a product Intuit prices at $220 a month, and free Payroll Elite at $80 a month. So the answer to "what version of QuickBooks do accountants use" is usually two things at once: QuickBooks Online Accountant as the practice console, and a QuickBooks Online plan inside each client's file at whatever tier that client is on.
The discount that makes multi-client work affordable comes from the ProAdvisor program (ConseillerPro on Intuit's French Canadian site). Sign a client up under wholesale billing, where the firm is billed, and the firm gets an ongoing discount of up to 50 percent off list for the life of that subscription. If the client pays Intuit directly instead, the discount is up to 50 percent for the first year only. QuickBooks Ledger, $8 a month in Canada, exists for the file this guide keeps running into: tax-only, dormant, low transaction, still needs books.
How much does QuickBooks cost across several companies?
List prices as of September 2026, per company, per month, before any promotion or ProAdvisor discount.
| Plan | United States | Canada |
|---|---|---|
| Free, no accountant access | $0 | not on the Canadian page |
| Simple Start, EasyStart in Canada | $38 | $30 |
| Essentials, Standard in Canada | $85 | $70 |
| Plus | $140 | $110 |
| Advanced | $340 | $220 |
Multiply by the number of files. Five Canadian clients on Plus is $550 a month at list, or $275 under wholesale billing. That bill grows every time you sign a client, and no version of QuickBooks Online avoids it.
Caribooks sits on top of that, not instead of it. It is a connector, so it reads the books you already pay Intuit for. The difference is the shape of the second bill:
| Line on the bill | Charged by | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| One QuickBooks Online subscription per client file | Intuit | $30 to $220 a month each in Canada |
| QuickBooks Online Accountant for the firm | Intuit | Free for a licensed firm |
| Caribooks Connector, one company | Peich Technologies | $39 a month |
| Caribooks Connector, up to five companies | Peich Technologies | $99 a month |
| Caribooks Connector, ten or twenty-five companies | Peich Technologies | $199 or $399 a month |
| Caribooks Autopilot, connector included | Peich Technologies | $149 for 1 company, $299 for 5, $499 for 10 or $999 for 25, per month |
Intuit's line scales per file forever. Caribooks connector pricing is flat within a plan: the fifth company costs nothing extra on the five-company Connector. Connector bundles cover 5, 10 or 25 companies; beyond 25, ask for a quote. Autopilot bundles reserve capacity for recurring work and include the connector for selected companies; other companies need connector coverage on the same bill. Same number in Canadian and US dollars. There is a 14-day free trial with no credit card, which is enough time to run two weekly passes and see whether the habit sticks. The pricing page has the current terms.
The honest warning: connect the files you actually work in. A dormant file opened twice a year does not earn a line on a monthly bill. Connect five, run them for a month, add more only when a file has earned it.
Name the company, every time
Ten client files do not strain the assistant. They strain your ability to say which one you mean. It will happily answer about 9182734 Canada Inc. when you meant 9182743 Canada Inc. Everything below removes that guess.
If more than one company is connected, the company has to be named in the request. Not implied by context, not carried over from the previous question, named. Under the hood every call carries a company parameter, and naming the client in your sentence is how it gets set.
Three habits make that reliable in a practice:
- Start each session by asking what is connected and at what access level. The assistant calls
list_connected_companiesand you get the company names as they are actually registered, which is the vocabulary it understands. - Agree on one shorthand per client and use only that. If two entities share a legal name root, decide which words distinguish them and always say those words. Half a name is where the wrong file gets opened.
- Check the first answer names the company back. If it does not, ask which company it used before you read any numbers.
Then add the verification habit: ask something you already know the answer to, on the file you think you are in. It catches a wrong company in seconds.
Access levels, per file
Access is per company, so keep most files read-only and open exactly one for the work in front of you. Nine client files read-only, the tenth in full access for as long as the task lasts, then back.
Every connection starts read-only, whether you plan it or not. Sending a document by email, voiding and deleting each need an explicit confirmation in the conversation, even on a company with full access. Read-only or write access on client books works through where the line belongs.
Monday morning across every client
This is the part that pays for itself. One session, the same questions asked of each file in turn, in the same order every week.
| Ask | What you are looking for |
|---|---|
| "Studio Nord: what changed in the books since last Friday?" | Volume that does not match what you expect from that client |
| "Studio Nord: aged receivables as of today. What is past 60 days?" | Collection calls, and stale invoices nobody has written off |
| "Studio Nord: aged payables, and what is due in the next two weeks." | Cash the client is about to need |
| "Studio Nord: what is sitting in Uncategorized Expense, Undeposited Funds and Opening Balance Equity?" | Anything above zero |
| "Now the same four for Rivard Plomberie." | The next file, without retyping the questions |
That last line is what makes it a sweep rather than five separate sessions. The questions stay in context, so each new company costs one sentence.
Example output, on fictional companies:
Studio Nord. Since Friday: 11 new transactions, 3 invoices issued totalling CA$18,400, 1 bill entered. Aged receivables CA$46,200, of which CA$12,800 is past 60 days and all of it is one customer. Payables due in the next two weeks: CA$9,150. Uncategorized Expense CA$1,240 across 6 transactions. Undeposited Funds CA$0. Opening Balance Equity CA$0.
Rivard Plomberie. Since Friday: 64 new transactions, no invoices issued. Aged receivables CA$81,500, of which CA$31,000 is past 90 days across four customers. Payables due in the next two weeks: CA$22,300, including CA$14,000 to one supplier. Uncategorized Expense CA$8,900 across 71 transactions. Undeposited Funds CA$4,410, unchanged since June. Opening Balance Equity CA$0.
Read those side by side and the week has planned itself. Studio Nord needs one collection call and six transactions coded. Rivard Plomberie needs an hour of coding before any report out of that file means anything, plus a conversation about deposits recorded and never banked. Neither conclusion came from the assistant. It pulled, compared and flagged; the reading is yours.
Paste the answers into your working notes as you go. Nothing here is clever. The saving is arithmetic: assembling those reports by hand is a short sequence of clicks, and you were doing it once per file. The assistant does not make any single lookup dramatically faster. It makes the twelfth one cost the same as the first.
Two things keep it honest. Ask the same questions in the same order each week, so a missing answer is obvious. And treat anything the sweep flags as a pointer to a file you should open, not as a conclusion. Working across several QuickBooks companies covers the mechanics of switching in more detail.
The first hour on a new client's file
A new file arrives and you know nothing about it. Read-only access covers every question below, so you can run it before anyone decides whether you get write access at all.
| Ask | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| "Company info and preferences for Rivard Plomberie: fiscal year end, accounting method, sales tax setup." | Whether the file is set up the way the client described it |
| "Trial balance as of today. How many accounts carry a balance?" | The size of the job, in one number |
| "Show me the chart of accounts. Flag accounts with near-identical names." | The duplicate-account problem, before it becomes your problem |
| "What is in Uncategorized Expense, Uncategorized Income, Ask My Accountant and Opening Balance Equity?" | How much of the previous year is unresolved |
| "List every journal entry posted in the last twelve months, with who posted it." | Who has been reaching into this file, and how often |
| "Aged receivables and aged payables as of today. What is older than 90 days?" | Whether the balances are real or historical fiction |
| "Which purchases and bills from the last twelve months have no attachment?" | The documentation gap, ahead of a year end or an audit request |
That last one runs as a single call rather than a manual diff, which matters on a file with a few thousand transactions. The whole list turns into a scoping conversation held on day one instead of week three.
Where it does not help
A messy file produces confident answers built on the mess. If a client's ledger has a year of miscoded transactions, faster access to those transactions is not progress, and the assistant will not tell you the data is wrong. Fix the file first.
If your bottleneck is data entry rather than retrieval, the gain is small. This is strongest on questions, comparisons and drafts, weakest on volume keying.
And month-end judgment does not compress. Accruals, cut-off and anything that depends on what you know about the business still take the time they take.
Where this is the wrong choice
If most of your files are QuickBooks Desktop, this does not apply. Desktop does not expose the API this depends on, so it is not supported and cannot be.
If your files are small and you touch each one a few times a year, per-company pricing works against you and the sweep has nothing to sweep. A practice with a handful of active files and a long tail of dormant ones should connect only the active ones, or skip it. QuickBooks Ledger at $8 a month is the better home for that long tail.
If you are technical and only ever work in one company file, Intuit's open-source MCP server is free and covers 29 record types and 11 reports. It needs a developer account, an OAuth app, API keys and a process kept running on your own machine, and it does not work from Claude on the web or on a phone. For one file, that may still be the right trade. The comparison works through it.
If nothing is connected yet, connecting QuickBooks to Claude covers the first company end to end. It starts read-only, and one connected file is enough to try a Monday pass before deciding whether the practice-wide version is worth it.
Intuit prices read September 2026 from Create or add another company file and the accountant pricing page. Recheck before quoting a client.