If you already have a QuickBooks Online login, click the gear icon, select Add another company, pick a subscription plan, and sign in with your existing user ID when prompted so the new company lands under the same account. Each company is its own separate paid subscription with its own books; nothing about setting one up touches any company you already have.
1. Decide if this is your first company or an additional one. Starting from scratch with no QuickBooks account yet means signing up fresh at QuickBooks' pricing page. Adding a second, third, or further company under a login you already use is a different, shorter path.
2. From inside an existing company, click the gear icon and choose Add another company. This is the fastest route if you're already signed in somewhere. It takes you to QuickBooks' plan-selection page for the new company specifically.
3. Pick a subscription tier for the new company. It doesn't have to match whatever plan your existing company runs on. Each company's tier and billing are independent, so a Simple Start company and a Plus company can sit under the same login without conflict.
4. When asked if you're adding to an existing account, choose Sign in. Enter the same user ID and password you already use for QuickBooks. This is the step that actually links the new company to your existing login instead of creating a second, separate account by accident.
5. Select Create a New Company rather than any other option offered. QuickBooks may also offer to convert existing data or start from a template; for a genuinely new company with no prior books, the plain new-company option is what you want.
6. Fill in the new company's basic details and confirm. Legal name, industry, and entity type get set up the same way they would for a first-time QuickBooks signup. Once confirmed, the new company appears in your company switcher alongside any others under the same login.
Standing up a new QuickBooks company takes a few minutes. Getting it actually usable, the chart of accounts, opening balances, connected bank feeds, a sales tax setup that matches the new entity's real obligations, is the part that takes real time and is easy to get subtly wrong on a rushed first pass.
This shows up most with businesses opening a second location, launching a new entity for legal or tax reasons, or splitting an existing business into separate books. The new company gets created fast, then sits half-configured for weeks while someone slowly rebuilds the vendor list, the item list, and the automation rules the original company already had.
A new company file is also a clean slate for anything that was duct-taped onto the old one. It's worth deciding what should carry over deliberately rather than letting whatever habits existed in the first company just repeat themselves in the second by default.
When a second entity gets stood up, the bank feeds, payment processor, and other connected tools get wired into the new company automatically instead of someone rebuilding each integration from memory a second time.
For a business running several QuickBooks companies under one login, we keep the account structure and categorization rules aligned across all of them, so reporting across entities doesn't require reconciling different naming conventions by hand.
Tell us what the new company needs to connect to, banking, payments, another system, and we'll tell you what can be wired up automatically instead of rebuilt by hand like the first one was.
Tell us what you had to configure by hand in your existing company, connections, categorization rules, recurring processes, and we'll tell you if the new one can inherit it automatically instead of starting from zero again. A new company is one example of starting over; we handle the same problem anywhere else in your business a fresh setup drags on longer than it should.
Let's talk →Yes, with no fixed limit tied to your login itself. Each additional company is its own separate subscription and its own set of books; you just switch between them from the company switcher once they're all added under the same account.
From the File menu, choose New Company, then either use the Express Start quick setup or the Detailed Start wizard for more control over the chart of accounts and preferences from the beginning. Desktop creates a local .QBW file for the new company rather than a cloud subscription.
Yes. Each company is billed as its own separate subscription; there's no bundled discount or shared plan just because the companies share a login. Two companies on the same tier means paying for that tier twice.
Not automatically through the setup flow itself. Lists like your chart of accounts, items, and customers need to be re-entered, imported from a spreadsheet, or migrated with a tool built for that; QuickBooks doesn't offer a built-in "clone this company" button during setup.