Multi-entity accounting means paying vendors for more than one legal entity, each with its own books and its own bank account. A holding company with three operating subsidiaries. A bookkeeping firm that runs accounts payable for a dozen clients. A non-profit with a foundation alongside it. In Zoho Books, each of these is a separate organization. In Zefty, it is too, and this article explains what that means in practice.
The short version: one Zefty organization equals one Zoho Books connection, one bank configuration and one subscription. A user can belong to as many organizations as needed and switches between them from the tenant menu. Nothing is shared between organizations except the people.
Why each entity is a separate organization
It would be tempting to run every entity through one account and just pick a bank account at payment time. Zefty does not work that way, on purpose. Three things are tied to the entity and cannot safely be mixed:
- The Zoho Books connection. Zoho Books itself is organized by organization, each with its own organization ID and its own API authorization. Zefty's Zoho API credentials are entered once when an organization is created and cannot be changed afterwards. The configuration screen says it plainly: to connect to another Zoho Books account, you must add a new organization.
- The bank emitter ID. Your bank issues a 10-character emitter (originator) ID to a specific legal entity for a specific account. The A record of every EFT 1464 file carries it. A file with subsidiary B's payments under subsidiary A's emitter ID is a file the bank will reject, or worse, accept.
- The file numbering. Each originator keeps its own sequence of file creation numbers. Sharing a counter across entities would break the sequence the bank expects.
Keeping entities separate is not a limitation to work around; it is what makes the audit trail per entity clean.
What is separate per organization
When you create an organization in Zefty, everything below belongs to it and only to it.
| Setting or data | Scope |
|---|---|
| Zoho Books data centre (zoho.com or zohocloud.ca), organization ID, client ID and secret, OAuth authorization | Per organization |
| Bank, business name, emitter ID, transit, institution and account numbers | Per organization |
| Last EFT file number and test mode | Per organization |
| Active Zoho Books custom view | Per organization |
| Vendors and bills synced from Zoho Books | Per organization |
| Exports, PDF reports and payment history | Per organization |
| Account Paid From and custom field mapping | Per organization |
| Subscription and additional user seats | Per organization |
| Users | Shared: a user can belong to several organizations |
The nightly sync at 2 a.m. and the on-demand Sync with Zoho run per organization as well. A sync problem in one entity does not affect another.
Adding an organization: the New organization option
You do not need a second account or a second email address. From inside Zefty, open the tenant menu (the organization switcher) and choose New organization. This starts the same setup flow you followed the first time:
- Organization wizard: legal name, email, website, address, province and phone for the new entity.
- Stripe Checkout: a subscription for this organization, in CAD, with automatic tax.
- Bank setup: the bank, business name (30 characters or fewer, as registered with the bank), the emitter ID, transit, institution and account number for this entity's account.
- Zoho API credentials: data centre, Zoho organization ID, client ID and client secret from the Zoho API console, with the redirect URL https://zefty.ca/authorize.
- Authorize: grant Zefty access to bills, vendor payments, contacts and banking in this Zoho Books organization.
- First sync: vendors, then bills, automatically.
Once the first sync finishes, the new organization appears in the tenant menu next to the others. Switching takes one click and the Dashboard, Bills, Report, History and Vendors screens all change to that entity.
A practical tip: the Zoho API client (client ID and secret) is created in the Zoho API console under a Zoho account. If each entity has its own Zoho account, create the client in the right one. If one Zoho account owns several Zoho Books organizations, you can reuse the same client ID and secret and only the Zoho organization ID changes.
Users who belong to several organizations
People are the one thing Zefty deliberately shares. A controller who oversees three subsidiaries has one login and three organizations in the tenant menu. A bookkeeper at a firm has one login and one organization per client.
How membership works:
- Adding a user is done from the Users screen inside an organization. If the email address already exists in Zefty, the message tells you the user will be associated with this organization rather than created again.
- Seats are counted per organization. Each subscription includes one user. Each additional user costs $14 per user per month, up to ten additional users, and the Users screen shows how many seats remain. Adding a user beyond the included seats prompts you and updates the Stripe subscription for that organization.
- Removing a user from an organization detaches them if they belong to others; they keep access to their remaining organizations. A user who belongs only to that organization is deleted permanently. The confirmation dialog states which case applies before you confirm.
Because seats are per organization, a person working across five entities occupies a seat in each. Plan for that when comparing plans: the Premium plan includes unlimited users, which changes the arithmetic for larger firms.
Billing: one subscription per organization
Each organization has its own Stripe subscription, its own invoices and its own Billing link in the user menu that opens the Stripe customer portal for that organization. This keeps the cost of each entity's payment operations in that entity's books, which is usually what the accountant wants.
Multi-organization is listed as a feature of the Team plan ($43 per month per organization) and above. Starter ($29 per month) is designed for a single organization with one user. Prices are in CAD and taxes are extra. There is no free trial, so it is worth deciding which entities genuinely need EFT payments before creating them.
A practical setup for an accounting firm
Consider a firm that handles accounts payable for eight clients, five of which pay vendors by EFT.
- The firm creates five organizations, one per client that pays by EFT. The three others stay in Zoho Books only.
- Each organization uses the client's bank emitter ID and bank account, not the firm's. The payments go out in the client's name from the client's account.
- The two staff who run payments are added as users in all five organizations. Each organization holds the included user plus one additional user.
- Each client's first file is generated in test mode and checked against the PDF report before test mode is turned off.
- At month-end, the staff switch through the tenant menu, run the payment checklist for each client, and save each PDF report in the client's file.
The result is five clean, separate audit trails, five separate invoices from Zefty that can be re-billed or absorbed as the firm prefers, and no risk of one client's payments ending up in another client's file.
Key takeaways
- One Zefty organization = one Zoho Books connection, one bank configuration, one file number sequence and one subscription.
- Zoho API credentials are fixed at creation; a different Zoho Books account always means a new organization.
- Add entities from the tenant menu with New organization; the setup flow is the same as your first one.
- Users are shared across organizations, but seats are counted per organization at $14 per additional user per month.
- Multi-organization is a Team plan feature; Premium adds unlimited users for larger firms.
Deciding between Team and Premium usually comes down to how many people need access across how many entities. The pricing page lays out both plans side by side so you can do that count before you create your second organization.