What a construction company learned about scaling finance across 10 entities on QuickBooks Online
An Ontario-based construction company had grown to somewhere between 10 and 15 entities, all running on QuickBooks Online. Each entity had its own projects, its own cost structures, and its own approval needs. The CFO knew the approval process was taking too long and costing too much, but quantifying that cost was part of the problem: when approvals happen across email, Slack, and verbal confirmations spread across multiple entities, nobody has a reliable picture of how much time the whole thing actually consumes.
So they did the math. When the CFO sat down and mapped the hours spent chasing approvals, resolving duplicate payments, reconciling inconsistencies across entities, and managing the back-and-forth that comes with informal processes, the number came to approximately $200,000 per year in lost productivity. The annual cost of the approval automation tool they implemented was around $1,000.
That ratio is striking on its own, but the more interesting story is in the decisions they made along the way, because those decisions apply to any business scaling finance operations across multiple entities.
• The company calculated $200,000 a year in time savings after structuring their approval workflows across 10 to 15 entities. Their annual cost for the tooling was around $1,000.
• The biggest barrier to scaling multi-entity finance wasn’t the technology. It was the fact that nobody had documented how the approval process actually worked.
• Different entities need different approval thresholds and routing. A startup division and an established operation within the same group cannot share the same rules.
• Half of CFOs say integration is their number one challenge. Running multiple QuickBooks Online files without a connected approval and reporting layer makes every month-end harder than it needs to be.
• Process drift across entities is inevitable unless the process is enforced by software. If the rules live in a Google Drive document, ten people will be following ten different versions within a year.
The process that existed in everyone’s head
The first and most revealing step was attempting to document the existing approval process. In conversations with multi-entity businesses, this is consistently the point where the gap between perception and reality becomes visible. Leadership assumes there’s a clear process because one was discussed at some point. In practice, each entity has drifted into its own version, and the people doing the day-to-day work are often following informal rules that were never written down.
For the construction company, the approval process across their entities amounted to something like “I send an email to the project manager and they get back to me.” There was no defined SLA, no escalation path, no visibility into where an approval was sitting at any given time, and no audit trail once it was done. Multiply that across 10 to 15 entities with different teams, different project timelines, and different spending patterns, and the coordination overhead becomes enormous.
Documenting the process before automating it was essential, because you cannot build a workflow in a system if you cannot describe the workflow in words. That documentation step also surfaced inconsistencies between entities that had gone unnoticed: different people applying different thresholds, approvals being skipped for certain suppliers, and entire categories of spend flowing through without any sign-off at all.
Why one approval workflow cannot serve every entity
Construction businesses are particularly interesting from a multi-entity perspective because the entities within a single group can vary widely. A residential development has different cost profiles, supplier relationships, and approval thresholds compared to a commercial construction project or a property management subsidiary. Applying the same approval rules across all of them creates friction in some entities and insufficient oversight in others.
The same principle applies in other industries. A group that runs a startup division alongside an established operation needs different routing and different limits for each. A business expanding internationally faces different currencies, tax rules, and regulatory requirements in each jurisdiction. The approval workflow that works perfectly for entity one may actively slow things down in entity two if it isn’t adapted.
The construction company built entity-specific approval matrices using ApprovalMax, with each entity’s rules reflecting its own cost structure, team, and risk profile. Approvers didn’t need access to QuickBooks Online itself, which simplified user management considerably. They could approve from a mobile app, from Slack, or from email, and set a delegate when they were unavailable, so approvals kept moving regardless of who was on-site or on leave.
A mobility equipment franchise that scaled to 50 locations on QuickBooks Online faced a similar challenge with a different symptom: the same product was called “blue scooter” in one location, “teal scooter” in another, and the brand name in a third. Each file made sense individually, but group-level reporting was impossible until they standardized naming conventions, chart of accounts structure, and onboarding processes across all entities. After a year-long rollout with test locations, they reached 95% adoption.
The drift problem that gets worse with every entity you add
Even after a multi-entity finance process is documented, implemented, and working well, it will drift over time unless the process is enforced by the system rather than by memory. People leave and take institutional knowledge with them. New hires learn a slightly different version of the process from whoever trains them. Small informal adjustments get made for convenience and never reverted. Within a year, ten people across ten entities can be following ten different versions of what was originally one process.
For the construction company, this was one of the strongest arguments for system-enforced workflows. When the approval rules live inside the tool, they apply consistently every time, regardless of who is handling the transaction. Changes to the rules happen at the source and take effect across every entity immediately. There is no Google Drive document to update, no email to send reminding people of the new threshold, and no ambiguity about which version of the process is current.
Regular process audits remain valuable even with automated enforcement, because the business itself changes. New suppliers, new project types, new team members, and new entities all create situations where the original rules may no longer fit. The difference is that auditing a system-enforced process means reviewing defined rules and their outputs, while auditing a manual process means interviewing people and hoping their answers match reality.
Why the math matters
The $200,000 in annual time savings that the construction company calculated did not include the reduction in risk, the improvement in audit readiness, or the value of having real-time visibility into committed spend across all entities. Those benefits are harder to quantify but arguably more important, because a single duplicate payment, a missed fraud, or a failed due diligence process can cost far more than the cumulative time savings.
Half of CFOs in a recent survey identified integration as their number one challenge. Running multiple QuickBooks Online files without a connected approval and reporting layer means every month-end involves exporting data from each entity, reconciling it manually, and hoping the numbers align. Adding structured approval workflows across entities addresses the integration problem from the spend side, because every transaction is coded, approved, and auditable before it reaches the ledger, which means the data flowing into reporting is already clean and consistent.
For a business considering this kind of investment, the question is rarely whether the return justifies the cost. At $1,000 per year against $200,000 in time savings, the ratio speaks for itself. The real question is how long the business can afford to wait, because the costs of informal processes compound with every entity you add, while the costs of structured processes stay relatively flat.
This article draws on insights from recent To the Max webinars covering multi-entity finance operations, AP automation, and scaling financial controls.
