How to share a P&L with franchisees

A franchisee who cannot see their own numbers manages on instinct. A franchisee who can see everybody's numbers is a problem of a different kind. Most networks land between the two: a monthly PDF per store, produced by hand, arriving late enough that the month it describes is over.

This guide covers how to give each franchisee a live Profit & Loss for their own store, what to put in it, and the two structures a network can have.

First, which structure is yours?

The answer changes everything that follows.

One ledger, a tracking option per store. Common where the franchisor does the bookkeeping. Every store is a tracking category option in one Xero organisation, or a class or location in one QuickBooks company. All the data is already together; the problem is letting a franchisee see only their slice.

A ledger per franchisee. Common where franchisees are independent businesses with their own accountant. The data is already separate; the problem is getting consistent reporting across files you do not all control.

If you are not sure, the test is whose bank account the sales land in.

Decide what a franchisee is accountable for

Worth doing before any software, because it is a commercial decision rather than an accounting one, and it is the thing that decides whether the report gets read.

Include what they influence: sales, cost of sales, wages, consumables, utilities, repairs, local marketing.

Think hard about royalties and marketing levies. They are real costs of being a franchisee and they are not controllable. Both choices are defensible: leave them out and the report measures store operations; put them in and it measures the franchisee's business. What does not work is putting them in without saying so, because the first thing a franchisee does with an unexpected line is stop trusting the whole report.

Leave out what belongs to you rather than them: head-office overheads, network marketing spend, your own financing costs.

How to share a P&L with franchisees

1. Tag every transaction with its store. One tracking category in Xero, or a class or location in QuickBooks, with an option per store. Tag the payroll journal too, or the biggest controllable cost in the business lands nowhere.
2. Connect the company to Vizii and sync. Your categories, classes and locations come through with the data.
3. Build the Profit & Loss layout once. Sections and account codes in the order you report, with every label renamed to your wording. This is where the royalty decision above becomes a line, or does not.
4. Reconcile before anybody sees it. Run the report unfiltered for a closed month and tie it back to the ledger's own Profit and Loss.
5. Preview as a franchisee. Open the account exactly as one of them will see it. This catches more mistakes than re-reading a permission list.
6. Invite each franchisee, scoped to their own store. They get their own option and nothing else — no other store's figures, no head-office costs, no balance sheet.
7. Agree how you will talk about it. A live report changes the monthly call from reading numbers aloud to discussing them. Say that explicitly, or the call stays as it was.

Franchisees sign in with a one-time link sent to the address you invited. They never get a Xero or QuickBooks login and use up no seat in either.

If each franchisee has their own ledger

Connect each company separately. Every franchisee's Xero or QuickBooks file becomes its own connection, switchable from one login, and you can build comparable reporting in each without asking anybody to change their bookkeeping.

What you will not get is a consolidated network Profit & Loss. Vizii never combines figures across companies — there is no group total and no intercompany elimination. If you need the network added up, that is a consolidation tool's job, and plenty of networks run one alongside per-store reporting.

Where the network shares a single ledger this does not arise: the combined figures are already in that one company, and the network view is simply the report with no filter applied.

A note on benchmarking

Franchisors often want franchisees to see how they compare with the rest of the network. Vizii does not produce anonymised league tables across stores; what it gives each franchisee is their own store, in full. If ranking across the network matters to you, look at tools built for that — it is a different feature from scoped reporting, and worth evaluating on its own terms.

FAQ

Can a franchisee see other stores' figures? No. Where the network shares one ledger, every total, chart and line they open is calculated only from records carrying their own store's tracking option, class or location. Where each franchisee has their own ledger, the companies are separate connections and nobody invited to one can reach another.

Do franchisees need their own Xero or QuickBooks subscription to read this? No. They are viewers in Vizii, signing in with a one-time email link, and never reach the accounting system at all.

Should royalties appear on a franchisee's P&L? Either is defensible, as long as it is deliberate and explained. Leaving them out measures store operations; including them measures the franchisee's own business. The thing to avoid is including them silently.

Can I give a franchisee more than one store? Yes. A multi-site franchisee can be scoped to several options and will see those and no others.

Can Vizii produce a consolidated P&L for the whole network? Not across separate ledgers — figures are never combined across companies. A single-ledger network already has its combined figures in that ledger.