How to manage multiple business locations: A CFO survival guide

Running multiple business locations can make tracking payments, managing cash flow, and measuring performance far more complex. And with every new office or location you add, things get exponentially more difficult.

This guide will walk through how you can manage your financial operations across different entities, currencies and markets (without feeling like you're losing your mind in the process).

We'll share practical ways to simplify payments, track what matters, avoid common mistakes, handle currency risk as your business scales, and keep your financial KPIs from turning into a mess of disconnected spreadsheets.

Let's get started.

What a multi-location business setup really means

A multi-location business runs operations across several offices, subsidiaries or branches. Sometimes only in one country or region, but often across borders as well.

Depending on the scale, each location may have its own bank accounts, dedicated team and budgets. And if you are working across borders, incoming and outgoing payments may involve multiple foreign currencies and different financial systems.

The more locations you add, the more you need a clear financial structure that shows balances, payments, and performance in one place.

The real challenge?

Managing finances across subsidiaries requires consistency and control across every entity.

When you set things up properly, you can see exactly where cash sits across entities. When you don't, you're stitching together reports from disconnected systems, manually reconciling payments, guessing at real-time balances, and hoping nothing slips through the cracks. 

What makes managing multiple locations a challenge financially?

When your operations are spread across multiple locations, complexity tends to stack up fast.

Different payment systems, different currencies, different data formats, communication gaps across teams — proper intercompany accounting becomes a nightmare. It all makes it exponentially more difficult to stay on top of your finances.

Fragmented banking systems make effective management harder

Most growing companies open separate local bank accounts for each new branch or subsidiary. Each account comes with different logins, interfaces, and reporting formats.

This fragmentation can actually limit your visibility into your overall cash positions and transaction activity across locations. Each location effectively operates in a silo, and without a central dashboard or system for managing finances across the board, reporting on financial KPIs or reconciling payments across locations becomes very manual.

Cash flow visibility and control decline as offices multiply

The more locations you manage, the harder it gets to know where your cash actually sits. Information often arrives late, causing balances between regions to fall out of sync. As a result, one location may end up overfunded while another runs short.

Inconsistent reporting like this leads to blind spots that delay decisions and slow operational responses. Without accurate, real-time data, it's nearly impossible to act with confidence. If you don't know your current and forecasted cash flow needs, you'll never be able to make confident investments, meet every supplier payment, or continue to add more locations.

Your finance department structure matters here, but even the best teams can't move fast when they're working with disconnected systems.

Cross-border payments and FX costs complicate decision-making

Paying international suppliers or collecting customer payments in foreign currencies adds uncertainty and cost. Exchange rates shift constantly, and traditional banks often tack on hidden spreads or FX fees along the way.

If each location manages its own cash balances and payments differently across currencies, trying to keep your finger on the pulse across the board becomes a nightmare. You'll have FX fees stacking up, zero visibility into the true P/L of each location, and even less clarity on how the parent organisation is doing. Worse still, payment reconcilitation across the org is going to take forever.

Understanding how FX payments work helps, but the real issue comes down to infrastructure.

If you're trying to manage international payments through a traditional bank instead of a dedicated cross-border payment provider, you're essentially trying to grill a steak in the microwave — sure, it might technically cook in the end, but it's most definitely not the best tool for the job.

How to build the right financial infrastructure for multi-location success (4 pro tips)

Setting up unified financial systems early makes managing multiple business locations far easier—and building your finance tech stack the right way gives you better visibility, predictability, and consistency across currencies and entities.

Here's where to start.

1. Work with a dedicated cross-border payment provider instead of using a traditional bank

By adopting a dedicated cross-border payment provider, you can move all your international transactions into one interface, giving you complete transparency across accounts and currencies.

If you're managing payments with iBanFirst, you can also track payments in real time, compare FX rates clearly, take advantage of FX risk management tools like forward payment contracts, and manage funds across multiple currencies far more easily and quickly than you could with a traditional bank.

What does this actually mean for you?

• You and your finance team can stop spending hours chasing down payment statuses across five different banking portals.
• Month-end close gets faster because reconciliation happens in one system, not across fragmented spreadsheets.
• When auditors come knocking, you hand them clean, consistent records — not a patchwork of statements from different banks in different formats.

When comparing cross-border payment providers, make sure to look for a provider that can actually handle the full scope of cross-border payments — not just the payment itself, but the tracking, reporting, and multi-currency management too.

2. Use a multi-currency account to simplify operations across currencies

A multi-currency account lets you hold, send, and receive funds in different currencies without opening separate bank accounts for each one. You can collect payments in a customer's local currency and pay suppliers in theirs — all from one place.

This reduces unnecessary conversion costs and helps you avoid exchange rate losses that never needed to exist in the first place. It also shows your total cash position across all currencies at once, which makes planning and allocation far more straightforward.

And converting funds between currencies? Assuming you're working with a cross-border payment provider like iBanFirst — it's as simple as moving cash from your chequing account to your savings account. A few clicks and you're done.

3. Centralise accounts and payments across business locations

Bringing accounts and payment workflows under one platform leads to consistent processes across all entities and locations. You can manage user permissions, approval flows, account balances, and transaction reporting from a single interface.

Here's what that actually means for you and your team:

• You can eliminate duplicate data entry and reconciliation work across locations.
• Payment errors drop because approval workflows stay consistent across every entity.
• Financial reporting becomes straightforward — you're pulling from one system instead of stitching together exports from five different banking portals and accounting tools.
• You're spending less time hunting down transaction details and more time analysing what the numbers actually mean.

Consolidating data makes it easier to prepare reports, compare performance between regions, and plan intercompany transfers. At the same time, it'll save time for the people managing each individual location, since they don't need to spend so much time preparing reports. You keep oversight while each branch still runs independently. 

4. Equip your business with tools to manage FX risk, like forward payment contracts

Exchange rate swings can hammer your profit margins when you operate internationally. A 5% currency shift can wipe out your entire margin on a deal if you're caught flat-footed.

Forward payment contracts let you lock in an FX forward rate for future payments, which adds predictability to your budgets and protects your margins from sudden market shifts. If you're working with iBanFirst, you'll have access to three different types:

• Fixed forward payment contracts: Lock in one rate for a specific future date
• Flexible forward payment contracts: Lock in a rate but draw down in multiple instalments
• Dynamic forward payment contracts: Set a floor rate while keeping upside if the market moves in your favour

Keep in mind, the goal isn't necessarily to chase the best rate at every turn but to create predictability. When you know what your FX costs will be three months out, you can plan budgets, price contracts, and forecast cash flow with confidence, instead of crossing your fingers and hoping the euro doesn't tank overnight.

Common mistakes multi-location businesses should avoid

Managing multiple locations successfully means dropping habits that create unnecessary complexity, fragment oversight, or unpredictably blow up your costs. Currency risk management mistakes are just the start.

Here's what else you should watch out for.

Treating each location as fully independent

Letting each branch or subsidiary handle all of its own banking and payments may seem like a good idea, but it can also create duplication and confusion.

With each location picking different providers, following different processes, and storing data in different formats:

• You can't compare performance accurately
• You can't consolidate cash flow data without massive manual work
• You're coordinating across intercompany accounting systems that don't talk to each other

Setting up shared financial infrastructure keeps operations aligned while still allowing local control where it matters. You can standardise core processes — payments, approvals, reporting — without forcing every location into identical workflows.

Overlooking FX exposure and payment timelines

Ignoring currency risk is one of the fastest ways to tank multi-location profitability. Exchange rates move daily, and small differences in payment timing can drastically shift your realised costs or revenue.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

• You quote a project in euros based on the current FX spot rate
• Three months pass...
• The exchange rate moved 4% (and not in your favour)
• Your margin evaporates before you even collect payment

Managing FX exposure across currencies shows you where your business is vulnerable and helps you prevent avoidable losses. Again, the goal isn't just to find the best rate possible — it's to build predictability and maintain control over your FX exposure.

Managing your finances exclusively with traditional banks

Traditional banks often lack the transparency and speed modern cross-border operations demand. Limited payment tracking and unpredictable FX pricing make managing multiple currencies inefficient at best, and impossible at worst.

Plus, many traditional banks have outdated systems that create bottlenecks and slow everything down. Your team may wind up wasting hours chasing down payment statuses or transaction details.

Modern cross-border payment providers let you manage multiple currencies and international payments in one place.

The biggest difference between banks and specialised providers comes down to this:

If your international payment workflow across locations involves logging into three different bank portals and praying for accurate settlement dates, we'd say it's time for a change.

How iBanFirst can help make the finance side of managing multiple offices more efficient

Look, managing finances across multiple locations doesn't have to be tedious and headache-inducing. You shouldn't have to spend hours on end manually reconciling messy books, pay a bunch of mystery FX fees, and cross your fingers that nothing slips through the cracks along the way.

iBanFirst arms small and medium-sized multinationals (SMMs) like you with a single platform to help you control and visibility across accounts, payments, and currencies.

With an iBanFirst account, you can:

• Hold, send, and receive funds in 25+ currencies from a single dashboard
• Track international payments in real time with shareable tracking links
• Lock in exchange rates with forward payment contracts to protect margins
• View cash positions across all entities to make better funding decisions
• Integrate payment workflows with your ERP or accounting software for easier reconciliation
• Manage intercompany transfers between subsidiaries without opening multiple accounts

The result? Less time spent hunting down transaction details—more time spent doing high-leverage work that actually moves the business forward.

Request an account to see how iBanFirst simplifies international operations, or take the interactive product tour to explore the platform yourself.