Why we built Projects — run multiple businesses from one Expensely account

For about a year, Team users kept asking us the same question in different words. "Can I run a second shop in here without it polluting the first one?" "I have two restaurants, can I track them separately in one account?" "Brand A and Brand B share an owner — how do I keep their P&Ls clean?"

For a long time the answer was: technically no, but you can fake it with tags and a lot of mental gymnastics. That answer was bad. We knew it was bad. We just hadn't shipped a good one yet.

This week we did. The feature is called Projects, it's on the Team plan, and it lets you run multiple businesses — shops, brands, departments, outlets, sub-companies — from one Expensely account. This is the maker's note: why we built it, how it works, and the things we explicitly didn't ship in v1.

Why we built it

Most Team customers are not the textbook small business. They're a chain. Three textile shops under one owner. Two restaurants and a delivery brand. A retail outlet plus a Shopify store. A salon group with four locations. The textbook accounting tools assume one company per file — and the moment you have two, your options are bad: run two QuickBooks files and consolidate in a spreadsheet, or pay for QuickBooks Plus ($85/mo) and learn how Classes work, usually with an accountant on the call.

That gap is what Projects fills. One log-in, one bill, separate P&Ls per business, a rollup view at the top, and access controls so a shop manager only sees their shop. No spreadsheet consolidation. No accountant on the phone. No second subscription.

How it works

Projects adds three things to Expensely:

• A project switcher in the top bar. Pick a project; the whole app re-scopes.
• An "All Projects" option that gives owners a company-wide rollup with per-project breakdowns.
• Per-project access controls — managers can be scoped to one shop, a few shops, or everything.

Switch projects from the dropdown and the dashboard, transactions list, history, AI insights and forecast all re-scope instantly. Log a transaction while "All Projects" is selected and the modal shows a project picker, defaulted to a sensible value (Default project, or the last project you logged into). Receipts, recurring bills and OCR uploads all carry a project tag.

The All Projects view

This is the CEO / owner view. Total revenue, total expenses, total margin — across every project — broken down so you can see which shop drove what. Forecasts run per-project and sum up; anomaly detection tags each anomaly with the project it came from. Ask the in-app AI "which shop drove February revenue?" and you get a per-project answer, not a blended average.

Manager access

When you invite a manager, you pick what they can see: all projects (current and future) or a custom subset. A manager scoped to Shop A can log expenses, photograph receipts, view their dashboard, run insights — but they can't see Shop B or the rollup. They can't even discover Shop B exists. The check is enforced on the backend on every request, not just hidden in the UI; if a scoped manager edits the URL to try to load Shop B, the API returns 403.

Owners always have all-access — you can't accidentally revoke yourself. We learned that lesson the hard way in another product. (Hi, past self.)

Categories stay shared

This was a fork-in-the-road decision and we picked the boring answer. Categories — Rent, Utilities, Salaries, Marketing — are global to your company, not per-project. That means "Rent" means the same thing in Shop A's books as it does in Shop B's. Your company-wide category report finally makes sense. The trade-off is that two genuinely unrelated businesses (e.g. a restaurant and a software consultancy) might have to share a category list. The honest answer is: if your two businesses are that different, run two accounts. Projects is for related businesses under one operator.

What we explicitly didn't ship in v1

Every product launch should be honest about its sharp edges. Three things Projects v1 doesn't do, and what to do about them:

Transfers between projects

If you move $500 of cash from Shop A's till to Shop B's till, today you log two transactions — an outflow in Shop A and an inflow in Shop B — and tag them so you can find them later. We didn't ship a proper transfer_pair_id link in v1. We have a design for it. It lands in v1.1 or v1.2 based on how many of you actually need it.

Per-project budgets

Budgets currently sit at the company level. If you want "Shop A's marketing budget is $1,000/mo", you can't set that yet. Workaround: filter to Shop A and use the company-level budget heuristics. Per-project budgets are sprint-next.

Per-project category trees

Covered above. Categories are global by design. If two genuinely different businesses need different category trees, run them in separate Expensely accounts. We may relax this in future, but we'd rather ship the simple version first and see what breaks.

Who this is for

• Small chains: 3–10 shops under one owner.
• Multi-brand operators: two restaurants, one retail outlet, one online store.
• E-commerce + brick-and-mortar: separate the Shopify side from the storefront so margins don't blur.
• Holding companies: several legal entities, one finance team, one CEO.
• Agencies and consultancies: internal cost-centres for Design, Engineering and Ops.

We deliberately did not build this for one-person operators with one business. If that's you, Projects gets out of your way completely — your account has a single "Default" project, the switcher doesn't even show up, and nothing about Expensely changes. You won't see the feature exists unless you upgrade to Team and add a second project.

How to turn it on

If you're on Team, you already have it. Look for the workspace switcher in the top bar. If you're on Solo or Free, the upgrade path is one click — see Team plan pricing.

The Team plan is $19/month with 5 seats. Projects are unlimited on Team. There's no per-project fee.

What we'll be watching

The interesting question now is what happens in the wild. How many shops do real chains actually run? How often do scoped managers need access to a second outlet temporarily? Do transfers between projects show up as a real pain or a corner case? We'll write another post in a few months with what we learned.

If you run multiple businesses and the Projects model fits your operation — or, more usefully, if it doesn't and we're missing something — write to us. We read every email.

If you want the side-by-side

We wrote a fair comparison vs the most direct equivalent in the QuickBooks world: Expensely Projects vs QuickBooks Classes. And the feature page lives at /projects.

Try it free

Start a Team trial, spin up one project per shop in ten minutes, and see if it fits. If it doesn't, the trial costs you nothing and we'd love a note explaining why.

Related reading

Try Expensely

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