How to charge my companies their portion of an expense from our main company

Keeping your financial data accurate is our priority, dlm0502. We'll guide you through the mechanics of how you can charge other companies their portion of expenses, so your revenues and expenditures will reflect correctly on your reports.

To split the expenses, every company involved should keep a record of them as a loan. The primary company will treat it as providing a loan to the other companies, while the other companies will consider it as taking a loan from the primary company.

Your main company should first create an account to track the loan and its repayment. Here's how:

1. Go to Settings, then select Chart of accounts.
2. Select New, then select Assets.
3. From the Save account under and Tax form section dropdown, select Loans to Others.
4. On the Account name field, enter a recognizable name like "Loan - the company name".
5. Select Save without entering an opening balance.

After that, issue a check for the loan. Here's how:

1. Go to + New, then select Check.
2. From the Bank Account dropdown, select the account you used to fund the loan.
3. On the first line, from the Category dropdown, select the account you created to track loans.
4. On the Amount field, enter the loan amount.
5. Select Save and close.

Once the other companies pay their expenses, record a bank deposit.

On the other hand, please see this article on how you can record a loan for your other companies' expenses: Set up a loan in QuickBooks Online.

Additionally, we recommend regularly reconciling your accounts (monthly) to track your transactions effectively. To help you in doing or fixing reconciliations in QBO, you can check out this article: Learn the reconcile workflow in QuickBooks.

If you have follow-up questions about managing expense transactions in QBO, you can always come back to this thread. We're here to help.

@dlm0502 

"The expense will be created when the payment feeds in through the bank feed."

You will need to make manual entries in Co. A (the company that makes the full payment and receives the reimbursements). Bank feeds doesn't allow you to classify the payment to more than one GL account (category) which is what you need to do in Co. A since that payment is their portion of the expense as well as receivables from the other 9 companies.

If you want to make this as easy as possible, here's my recommendation: let's say rent is $1,000 which will be paid by Co. A and that will be split between all 10 companies ($100/ea.). In Co. A, create an Other Current Asset (OCA) for the receivable. Then, still in Co. A, create either an Expense or Check transaction to pay the rent expense in full and record $100 to Rent Expense and $900 to the newly-created OCA receivable account.  You now have $100 rent expense in Co. A and $900 in receivables on your balance sheet.  Match the $1k payment to your bank feed in Co. A.  In the other 9 companies, you can use the $100 payments brought in through bank feeds to book the rent expense.  When you reimburse Co. A, record a deposit in Co. A for $900, assign the newly-created OCA account to the deposit and match it to the bank feed.  That will zero out the receivable.  You now have a $100 rent expense in each company and the payments have been matched to the bank feeds.