"I have 18 QuickBooks Company Files, one for each entity and each trust. Monthly: checks for bills are written from the Management Company and the account is assigned 'Due from X Location'. I then have to go to that entity's file and post the expense to the correct P&L line."
That's from a post on r/Bookkeeping. The person manages 13 entities and 5 family trusts. Nobody replied with surprise. The top responses were variations of: yes, same here.
Deloitte and InvestHK counted 3,384 single-family offices in Hong Kong at end-2025 - up 25% from 2,703 two years earlier, mostly driven by Mainland Chinese principals formalising structures in HK as their wealth crossed into the kind of complexity that needs a dedicated vehicle to manage it.
What Deloitte doesn't track is how many of those 3,384 offices run their books the way that r/Bookkeeping post describes: one accounting file per entity, one login per ledger, and a monthly consolidation that happens in Excel by whoever has the most time.
Most of them do.
What the structure looks like
A mid size Hong Kong SFO in our client work - HK$300M to HK$1B in assets - usually holds its wealth through five to fifteen separate legal entities. There's the management company, one or more FIHVs (family-owned investment holding vehicles), a handful of SPVs holding private equity or real estate positions, an offshore holdco in BVI or Cayman, and often a Mainland subsidiary for China investments.
Each entity is legally separate. Each HK-incorporated entity needs its own accounting records under the Companies Ordinance; the offshore entities (BVI, Cayman) are governed by their own jurisdictions' laws. Each carries different currency exposure: HKD for operating costs, USD for investment returns, RMB distributions from the mainland sub, CNH on the offshore leg.
On Xero or QuickBooks, that's five to fifteen logins. The intercompany transactions - management fees flowing upward, loans between entities - get reconciled by hand. The month end close takes as long as it takes. When the principals want to know where everything stands someone builds a consolidated view in Excel and sends it as a PDF.
Most of the time, this works well enough.
Where it breaks
The problem isn't that QuickBooks is bad software - it's a reasonable product for a single company. A family office with twelve entities isn't one company. QuickBooks wasn't built for this.
In Oracle NetSuite OneWorld, intercompany transactions post into both entities automatically and eliminations run at period close. In a multi-file QuickBooks setup, that same reconciliation is rebuilt from scratch every month. The bigger risk is that it can be wrong, and the error won't show up until year-end, when the auditor asks for the group consolidated accounts - and the group consolidated accounts don't exist from any single place.
The regulatory side
Under s.379 of the Companies Ordinance a Hong Kong holding company is required to prepare consolidated group financial statements at year-end. There are exemptions - wholly-owned subsidiaries under s.379(3), s.383, and Schedule 3 are commonly used in SFO structures with offshore topcos and can provide a real carve-out, so in practice more SFO structures fall inside those exemptions than the plain reading of the ordinance implies. But a typical family office structure with several entities at varying ownership levels, some partially owned, still doesn't navigate the exemptions cleanly. Year-end becomes a reconstruction exercise, and the pressure falls on whoever has been holding the spreadsheet.
The AMLO layer works differently than most people assume. A pure proprietary SFO managing its own wealth is typically the subject of KYC by its banks and brokers - not a reporting entity under the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing Ordinance (Cap. 615) - unless it acts as a trust or company service provider or holds an SFC licence. That distinction doesn't lower the documentation bar much in practice. The banks and brokers on the other side of the relationship will demand source-of-funds evidence and transaction rationale on an ongoing basis. A collection of Xero logins and a shared Drive folder doesn't hold up to that standard.
A pressure more specific to the HK market comes from the FIHV regime. Since the Inland Revenue (Amendment - Tax Concessions for Family-owned Investment Holding Vehicles) Ordinance 2023 took effect (gazetted May 19, 2023), a family-owned investment holding vehicle meeting the NAV, staffing, and operating expenditure thresholds can elect for a 0% profits tax rate on qualifying investment returns. Audit obligations for these entities come from the Companies Ordinance (Cap. 622) and general profits tax practice, not the FIHV regime itself - but the practical point stands: an FIHV election has to be supported by proper books of account and audited financial statements, not summary spreadsheets.
None of this makes spreadsheets illegal. What's changed is the volume of documentation the banks, auditors, and IRD will expect on the back end.
Who fixes it
It's a pattern that comes up across accounting forums - not just Hong Kong, not just one community. The upgrade almost never starts with the principals. It starts with the first in-house finance hire.
The controller or CFO who joins an office that's been running on fractional bookkeepers and an external CFO who visited twice a year inherits the full setup on day one. That person has a mandate, maintains professional standards, and is actively looking for a solution. The question is what to upgrade to.
For a Hong Kong structure - five to twenty entities, multi-currency books, a Mainland sub, a FIHV election in progress, or AMLO obligations to manage - the answer usually comes down to NetSuite OneWorld or Sage Intacct. Both handle multi-entity consolidation. They're not the same product. NetSuite is the stronger call when the Mainland sub adds complexity or the entity count is above ten; Intacct makes more sense for simpler structures that don't need the full OneWorld overhead. We've written a breakdown of where each fits for HK structures if you're at that stage.
If you're earlier in the process - still at "do we actually need to do something about this?" - the PS Global Family Office page covers what the implementation involves, what it doesn't replace (NetSuite handles the accounting book of record; it's not a portfolio analytics system), and what getting started looks like in practice.
Number of family offices in Hong Kong will keep growing, and more of them will hit this wall each year.
PS Global is an Oracle NetSuite partner implementing multi-entity financial systems for Hong Kong family offices and holding groups. Talk to us about your structure.
