Spreadsheet Sync in QuickBooks Online Advanced is an Excel and Google Sheets add-in, included with Advanced and Accountant plans at no extra charge. It pulls reports and lists into a sheet, refreshes them on demand or when the workbook opens, and lets you edit transactions in bulk and post them back. It can also stack the P&L, balance sheet or trial balance of several companies into one sheet, but only where account names, types and levels match exactly, and it does nothing about the money moving between your companies. It is a fast, refreshable export rather than a consolidation, and it needs a $340-a-month plan on every file.
What it is and what it needs
Spreadsheet Sync is Intuit's add-in that connects a spreadsheet directly to a QuickBooks Online company, so data flows both ways without a CSV in the middle.
Intuit's FAQ, updated 5 August 2026, sets the conditions. It is only available to Advanced or Accountant customers and is included in the cost of those plans. Plus does not qualify. It works with the Office 365 edition of Excel and with Google Sheets, and it will not work with older Excel versions. Advanced lists at $340 a month per company on Intuit's pricing page as of 23 September 2026, up from the $235 that Coefficient's March 2026 comparison still quotes, so if you find a price online check its date. QuickBooks Advanced against Plus covers what else the extra $200 a month buys.
The accountant's edition is the loophole owners miss. If your outside accountant works in QuickBooks Online Accountant, they have Spreadsheet Sync on every client file they can open, including your Plus files, which is how a lot of small-group board packs get built today.
The three things it does well
The first is pull and refresh. You choose a report template, P&L, trial balance, balance sheet, statement of cash flows, AP aging or sales among them, set the filters once, and the sheet fills. Next month you refresh instead of rebuilding, with a quick refresh, a refresh after editing the filters, or an automatic refresh when the workbook opens. For a controller with a formatted board page in Excel and a QuickBooks tab feeding it, that removes an hour of copy and paste a month.
The second is bulk edit. Pull a list of invoices or bills into the sheet, change a class, a due date or a memo across two hundred rows, and post the changes back. Anyone who has reclassed a quarter of transactions one at a time understands why this alone justifies the add-in for some firms. It is also the reason the add-in is not read-only, and why the login you connect it with matters.
The third is the custom report. A QuickBooks report has a fixed shape. If you want gross margin by job next to hours from a payroll export, the sheet is where that gets built, with a live QuickBooks feed underneath it.
The multi-company report, step by step
Intuit's article on combining reports from multiple companies, also updated 5 August 2026, describes three report types that can be stacked: balance sheet by multiple periods, P&L by multiple periods, and trial balance. You pick the companies you have access to and the periods, and the add-in lays each company's figures side by side with a total column.
Intuit then advises you to make the chart of accounts in each company file identical as much as possible, and that one sentence decides whether the sheet is useful, because accounts combine onto one line only when the name, the account type and the hierarchical level match. They fail to combine when one is a sub-account and the other is top-level, when the spelling differs, when the account numbers differ, or when one company uses a number and the other does not. Case does not matter, which is the only concession.
Three files. An HVAC contractor, a plumbing company, and the LLC that owns their shop. The contractor's bookkeeper set up "Repairs & Maintenance" as a top-level expense. The plumbing company, set up by a different bookkeeper two years later, has "Repairs and Maintenance". The property LLC uses "R&M" as a sub-account under "Building". November spend was $9,340, $4,210 and $4,380. On the combined sheet those appear as three separate lines, alphabetized apart, and the reader who scans down to "Repairs and Maintenance" sees $4,210 and moves on. The grand total at the bottom is right, which is worse, because nothing on the page says the line is wrong.
The same sheet adds the property LLC's rent income to the group's revenue. The LLC charges the contractor $7,200 a month and the plumbing company $4,600, so combined revenue for November reads $11,800 higher than what the group sold to customers, and combined expenses read $11,800 higher too. Net income is unchanged, but margin is wrong, and if a lender asks why revenue exceeds customer sales there is no line on the sheet that explains it. Intercompany eliminations, explained for owners walks through the entries that have to come out.
What it does not do
An intercompany elimination is the removal, from a combined statement, of every transaction between companies in the same group, so that revenue, expenses, receivables and payables show only what involves outsiders.
Spreadsheet Sync does not do that. Intuit's article on combining reports does not mention eliminations. It does not mention currency, so a Canadian subsidiary stacks in Canadian dollars beside US ones. It does not combine budgets across companies. It has no alerting, so nothing tells you a number moved until someone opens the workbook. And the multi-company view exists for three statement types only, so an AR aging across companies, the report a multi-company owner asks for most, is three pulls and a manual stack. A consolidated balance sheet from QuickBooks Online shows what the balance sheet version needs on top of what the add-in gives.
The common advice on the QuickBooks Community, in a thread from 4 October 2023 on combined reporting from multiple companies, is to standardize the charts of accounts and then use Spreadsheet Sync. We would reverse the order. Standardizing three charts that three bookkeepers built over five years is a project that gets started and rarely finished, because every rename ripples through saved reports, budgets and your CPA's tax mapping. Stack the reports first, count the lines that fail to combine, and decide from the count whether the clean-up is worth doing.
Who it suits, and who it does not
Spreadsheet Sync suits a person who already lives in Excel or Sheets and is comfortable with a chart of accounts: an accountant building a client's board pack, a controller with a formatted model, or a bookkeeper doing a bulk reclass. Uncat, which sells to bookkeeping firms, notes that it takes a lot longer to figure out Spreadsheet Sync and that it is not approachable for most clients, and that matches what we see. The setup is a few hours, and the monthly maintenance is an hour someone must remember to spend.
It does not suit an owner who wants the number on a phone at 7 a.m. Nothing in the add-in pushes. The workbook is the product, and if the person who built it leaves, it usually goes stale within a quarter. It also does not suit a group where the operating companies are on Plus and the owner does not want $340 a month per file for an add-in that still needs a clean-up before the total means anything.
Navigator reads every QuickBooks Online file in the group as it is, on Plus or Advanced, read-only, and shows the group without a chart-of-accounts clean-up first. The consolidated and per-entity views are on the base plan at $299 a month for the first entity and half for each additional one; intercompany elimination is on the Pro plan at $499. Plans are on navigatorhq.ai.
The alternatives, fairly
Export to Excel is free and static. Every report in QuickBooks Online exports, on any plan, and for a one-off request from a lender it is fine. The cost is that nothing refreshes and every month starts from scratch.
A reporting layer such as LiveFlow or Fathom sits between QuickBooks and a report and handles more than one file with its own mapping; the best QuickBooks reporting tools compares them. They are built for the same person Spreadsheet Sync is built for, a finance professional producing a pack, and they charge for it.
A read-only roll-up connects each file, maps the accounts, removes the intercompany entries and shows one picture to the owner without a workbook. That is what consolidating multiple companies in QuickBooks Online argues a multi-company owner needs.
None of these routes fixes books that are behind. A combined sheet built on one file that closed in September and two that closed last week is as current as September, whichever tool assembled it.
Questions owners ask
Is Spreadsheet Sync free with QuickBooks Online Advanced?
It is included in the subscription for QuickBooks Online Advanced and QuickBooks Online Accountant, with no separate charge, according to Intuit's FAQ updated 5 August 2026. The cost is the plan it rides on: Advanced lists at $340 a month per company as of September 2026, so for three companies the add-in is free and the plans are $1,020 a month.
Does Spreadsheet Sync work with QuickBooks Online Plus?
No. Intuit's FAQ says it is only available to Advanced and Accountant customers. On Plus you have the ordinary export to Excel from any report, which produces a static file that does not refresh and cannot post edits back. If your accountant is on QuickBooks Online Accountant, they can use Spreadsheet Sync on your Plus file through their own login.
Does Spreadsheet Sync work on a Mac or with Google Sheets?
It works with the Office 365 edition of Excel and with Google Sheets, and Intuit says it will not work with older Excel versions. On a Mac, that means the Microsoft 365 subscription version of Excel, or Sheets in a browser. If you are on a perpetual-license Excel from a few years ago, the add-in will not load.
Can Spreadsheet Sync combine multiple companies?
Yes, for three report types: profit and loss by period, balance sheet by period, and trial balance. It stacks each company's report into one sheet and adds a total. Accounts combine only where the name, type and hierarchical level match exactly across files, so companies whose charts differ produce duplicate lines and a total that is right in aggregate and wrong by line.
Does Spreadsheet Sync do intercompany eliminations?
No. Intuit's article on combining reports does not mention eliminations, and the multi-company sheet leaves rent, fees and loans between your companies in the totals. If the property LLC charges the operating company rent, that rent appears as revenue in the combined figure. Removing it is a manual step, in the sheet or in the books.
Related
If the question behind this one is whether to upgrade at all, QuickBooks Advanced against Plus sets out what the $200 a month buys and what it does not. For what a combined sheet has to remove before the total means anything, read intercompany eliminations, explained for owners. And whether QuickBooks Online can consolidate multiple companies is the wider answer of which Spreadsheet Sync is one part.
If you would rather see the three files on one line each without touching a chart of accounts, the 30-day trial connects each file read-only in a couple of minutes and needs no card: navigatorhq.ai.
You're on the list.
The next post goes to . While you wait, the free Accounting Health Check scores your own books.
Published . Last updated . Reviewed by a CFO on the Navigator team.