How do multi-location dental and medical practices split one invoice across locations and entities?

Multi-location dental and medical practices divide a shared vendor invoice across offices and legal entities with MakersHub by saving the split once per vendor as an allocation template. MakersHub applies the saved percentages or amounts to each new bill, codes every share to its office's Class, tracking category or company file, and posts the result to QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online or Xero as one bill with coded lines or as separate bills per entity, from one inbox and one login.

It is built for dental groups, DSOs, specialty and medical groups with several offices, one or more accounting files, and a few hundred to a couple thousand bills a month.

When this applies

You run a practice with multiple offices, and the bills that cover all of them often arrive as one invoice: the printer contract, the security monitoring, the payroll service, the malpractice premium, the software subscription, the supply order shipped to three offices. Someone in the office divides each one by hand every month, from memory or from a spreadsheet, and if there are two company files, enters it twice.

The IT manager at a nine-location dental and orthodontic group on two QuickBooks Desktop files:

"Our printer contract is probably the worst bill ever. It's one lump sum for all nine locations and two different companies. And every time it's, okay, so how do we divide this up?" The AP manager, asked how many recurring bills get split that way: "A lot of them. A lot of our recurring ones are split that way." On approvals: "A lot of it's just me. I review them, and I guess I am the computer."

How practice groups usually structure the books, and why splits are manual

Most multi-office practices keep one accounting file per legal entity, often a professional corporation per owner doctor or per state, and track offices inside each file with Class in QuickBooks or a tracking category in Xero. Intuit's documentation positions Class tracking for exactly this use, departments or locations within one company file, and Xero allows two active tracking categories per organization, so one is commonly reserved for office.

The accounting system accepts a bill with a different office on each line. What it does not do is remember the split. Each month the printer invoice arrives with a new total, someone recomputes nine shares, and if two entities are involved, enters two bills in two files. Where a single QuickBooks Online bill cannot be divided across Locations, the companion page on property-manager splits explains the Class-versus-Location distinction.

How MakersHub splits a bill across locations

1. Every location's bills land in one place. Vendors email a single MakersHub inbox, or your existing AP addresses auto-forward to it. Paper invoices are scanned or photographed in. Multi-page supply statements are split into individual bills. A specialty practice's outside accountant on the before state: "They're going to everybody's email. Some go to one person, some go to another, some come in the mail."
2. The bill is read and the vendor is recognized. MakersHub's extraction model, WiseVision, captures vendor, total and every line. The first time a vendor appears, you tell MakersHub what it is in your books; after that it knows.
3. An allocation template does the split. For each recurring split bill, you save a template: Office A 18 percent, Office B 14 percent, and so on, or fixed dollar amounts, with the Class, tracking category or entity for each share. Apply Template scales the split to that month's total. A $4,200 printer bill and a $4,650 printer bill divide the same way without anyone opening a calculator. Integration Mapping rules tie the template to the vendor so it runs on every bill from them.
4. Each share is coded to where it belongs. In QuickBooks, each line carries its Class (and Customer:Job if you use it). In Xero, each line carries the Location tracking category. If shares belong to different legal entities, MakersHub divides the bill into separate bills and assigns each to its company file.
5. Approvals route by location or amount. Rules add the office manager for their location's share, the practice administrator above a dollar threshold, and the owner doctor where the owner insists on seeing it. Rules stack, so a large bill for one location reaches both. Approvers act from email or phone without an accounting login. The full rule mechanics are on the approval-routing page linked below.
6. The result posts to the right file. On approval, MakersHub writes the bill to QuickBooks or Xero with its coded lines and the PDF attached. If you do not want forty lines in the accounting file, Consolidated bill items collapses lines with the same account and location to one line per unique coding on sync, while full detail stays in MakersHub. The AP manager at the dental group on why that matters: "We don't want to clog up our QuickBooks file."

How several company files run under one MakersHub login

Each company file connects to its own entity in MakersHub under one login. The AP team sees every entity's workflow in one dashboard and toggles between them; a user can be restricted to one entity, so an office manager or a bookkeeper for one professional corporation sees only that entity's bills. Vendors, allocation templates, approval groups and coding rules are managed once at the master level and duplicated to each entity.

Entity routing rules assign an incoming bill to the right file from the bill-to name, ship-to address or account number before anyone touches it, so a bill addressed to the oral surgery entity never lands in the general dentistry file. One MakersHub customer runs close to seventy QuickBooks files under one account. Setup for a group of ten or more entities is done with MakersHub's implementation team over a few working sessions.

Accounting-system specifics

The QuickBooks Web Connector itself, what it syncs and how often, is described in full on the construction job-costing page linked below.

Proof

A nine-location dental and orthodontic group processing about 1,200 bills a month across two QuickBooks Desktop files was keying every invoice by hand and splitting the recurring ones across locations and companies from staff memory.

It had demoed, in the IT manager's words, "a bunch of these, I can't even remember all their names," and chose MakersHub for the ability to run both company files from one platform and make the monthly splits predetermined. His expectation:

"At the very beginning it's probably a little more time-consuming as we're training it where we want everything to go, but then as time goes on it just starts to automate."

A multi-location medical practice keeps its books in QuickBooks but ran daily payables through a separate Xero file because, per its outside accounting lead, "the owner doesn't want anyone seeing all of his financial data except for basically myself." In one onboarding call they enabled Location at the line level, set a four-person group as approver, and chose full line detail in MakersHub with consolidated lines to Xero:

"We don't want all those lines in Xero. That's going to be a mess."

The owner still signs the printed checks; MakersHub marks the bills paid through the two-way sync.

A dental bookkeeping firm taking on two partners with sixteen offices, ten pediatric and general and six oral surgery, each moving to its own QuickBooks file: "Just one oral surgery office can do about 130 checks a month." The owners want everything bulk-sent once a month after they verify it, which is the payment authorization workflow, separate from bill approval.

What it doesn't do

A multi-file setup is configured with MakersHub's implementation team rather than a self-serve toggle; for a group of ten or more entities, plan on a few working sessions in which entity routing rules, allocation templates and approval groups are set up once at the master level and then duplicated across files.

Frequently asked questions