Running multiple businesses from one account in South Africa

A lot of South African sole traders and small business owners are not running one business. A consultant who also rents out equipment on the side. A couple who each registered their own entity but do the books together on a Sunday night. A shop owner who opened a second branch under a separate registration for liability reasons. Here is how SortedNexus handles that without asking you to log in twice.

Why one owner ends up with more than one business

It rarely starts as a plan. A side project that was meant to stay a hobby starts invoicing real clients. A husband-and-wife team each register their own sole proprietorship so income and liability stay separate, but they still do admin together. A consultancy spins off a second entity to ring-fence risk on a bigger contract. None of these are edge cases: they are the normal shape of small business growth in South Africa, and almost none of the tools built for a single business handle it cleanly.

The usual workaround is two logins, two spreadsheets, or one account with everything mixed together and a colour-coding system nobody fully trusts by month three. Client lists blur. An invoice gets created under the wrong business. The VAT number on a quote is right for one entity and wrong for the other.

How SortedNexus keeps them apart

On the Pro plan, one login can hold your default business plus up to five extra businesses. Each one gets its own invoices, quotes, clients, and cash flow ledger, its own VAT number and entity type in Settings, and its own logo on generated documents. Nothing from one business appears in another. A client you invoiced under Business A does not show up when you are working in Business B, even though you are the same person, on the same screen, seconds apart.

What's separate, and what isn't

→Separate per business: invoices, quotes, clients, cash flow entries, VAT number, entity type, financial year end, logo, and banking details shown on documents.
→Shared across every business on the account: your login, your subscription and billing, and the Pro tier itself. You do not pay per business: one Pro subscription covers your default business plus up to five extras.
→Follows whichever business is active: the Settings page itself needs no separate mode for this. It always reads and writes whichever business you currently have selected, so setup feels identical whether you are on your first business or your sixth.
→The Compliance Calendar checks all of them. Our Compliance Calendar and its email reminders run against your default business and every extra business you have added, so a VAT201 or CIPC deadline for Business B does not get missed just because you were looking at Business A that week.

Switching between businesses

A business switcher sits in the dashboard so changing which business you are working in is a couple of clicks, not a separate login. Whatever you had open, an invoice draft, the cash flow view, stays tied to the business it belonged to. Switch, and the page you land on reflects the newly active business instead.

This matters most on a day where you are doing admin for both businesses back to back: quoting a job for Business A in the morning, then reconciling last month's cash flow for Business B in the afternoon. There is no risk of a client from one business ending up on an invoice for the other, because the client list itself is scoped to whichever business is active.

The cap, and what happens if you downgrade

A Pro account can hold up to five extra businesses beyond the default one that comes with the account, six in total. That cap exists to keep the feature genuinely useful for the small-business-owner-with-a-side-venture case it is built for, rather than turning into a general-purpose multi-tenant platform.

If a Pro account with extra businesses ever drops to Starter or Free, nothing is deleted. The account simply falls back to showing the default business until it upgrades to Pro again, at which point every extra business, and everything invoiced, quoted, or logged under it, is exactly where it was left.

Adding your second business

Upgrade to Pro

Multiple businesses is a Pro-only feature. Starter and Free accounts run a single business.

Open Businesses in your dashboard

Click "Add another business" and give it a name. It starts with a clean slate: no clients, no invoices, no cash flow carried over from your default business.

Fill in its Settings

VAT number, entity type, financial year end, logo, and banking details are all set per business, the same fields you already know from your first one.

Switch and work

Use the business switcher whenever you need to move between them. Everything you create lands under whichever business is active at the time.

Running more than one business?

Pro covers up to five extra businesses under one login, each with its own invoices, quotes, clients, cash flow, and Compliance Calendar coverage.

See Pro pricing →Go to Businesses

Sources

Disclaimer: This article describes how the SortedNexus product works and is not legal or tax advice. Whether you should register a separate legal entity for a second business, and how income and liability should be structured between entities, depends on your own circumstances. Consult a registered tax practitioner, accountant, or attorney before making structural decisions about your business.