Family offices rarely operate as a single entity. Most that we've seen, including in our client list, run across a dozen or more legal structures, including operating companies, holding entities, trusts, and investment vehicles.
Money moves between them constantly; for example, one entity covers a shared expense, another funds a sibling entity, a parent company invests in a subsidiary, etc. Every one of those movements has to be booked on both sides, or the consolidated books don't tie out.
This is the part of family office accounting that looks simple when you say it out loud (or map it on a whiteboard), but it turns into hours of manual work, if not more, in practice. We built SumIt to handle that double-sided bookkeeping end to end, and today, I want to walk through how.
Setup: Only define the relationship once
The foundation is what we call an account pair — a named, reusable link between two accounts in the chart of accounts. One side is debited (the receivable, or "Due From"), the other is credited (the payable, or "Due To"). You configure a pair once per organization, and SumIt automatically flags both accounts as intercompany accounts behind the scenes.
From that point on, SumIt's system knows these accounts represent a cross-entity relationship and treats them accordingly, including in the bill-pay integrations, where automated payments need to know exactly which Due To/Due From accounts to use.
You do this setup only once, and everything downstream builds on it.
Automation: 3 ways in for one balanced result
Once a pair exists, SumIt generates the full balanced set of journal entries for you — one entry per entity, with the offsetting intercompany legs filled in automatically so debits equal credits across the group. There are three ways this happens today:
In a journal entry: You record the activity across entities and select the account pair. SumIt then builds the balanced breakdown and shows you a preview before you save. This is the right path for allocations, such as splitting a shared office rent bill among three entities.
In the bank feed: When a transfer shows up in two entities' bank feeds, you mark it as an inter-entity transfer, choose both sides and the pair, and SumIt generates the linked journal entries and ties the two bank transactions together. There is no need for any kind of manual journal entry.
Through BILL payments: When one entity pays a bill that belongs to another via our BILL or Routable integrations, the Due To/Due From entries are booked automatically using the pair configured for that integration.
The majority of inter-entity journal entries in SumIt today are generated by the system instead of needing to be entered by hand. With that in mind, note that manual entry is reserved for a handful of genuine exceptions.
Rules and the Checker
The same logic extends in two directions.
The bank feed step is also becoming a policy rather than a manual categorization task. We're building Inter-Entity Rules, which will let you set a rule once — specifying the account pair and the counterparty entity — so matching transfers get booked automatically as they land, the same way ordinary categorization rules already work. This is coming shortly.
The Inter-Entity Checker closes the loop on accuracy today. It surfaces three kinds of problems before they can break a consolidation: entries missing the counterparty code that elimination depends on, entries where one entity recorded a balance and the offsetting side never showed up, and entries where both sides were booked but don't reconcile — different amounts, or both sides landing on the same account instead of the correct Due To/Due From offset. In that last case, the Checker identifies why the two sides don't line up in addition to flagging the mismatch.
Together, Rules and the Checker will mean inter-entity activity is both processed and enforced, without anyone needing to catch the exception by hand.
The payoff
All of this exists to make one thing correct: consolidation. When you run a consolidated balance sheet, SumIt automatically eliminates intercompany balances so the group view isn't double-counted. The receivable on one entity and the payable on another cancel out, and ownership-based stakes are appropriately netted under the equity method.
That elimination works because the account pairs mark which accounts are intercompany and the entity codes identify who owes whom. Get the setup and the booking right, and consolidation becomes a report you run very easily. The Checker makes it easier to catch the exceptions before they reach that report at all.
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