Combined statements. Not consolidated. Here's the difference, and why it matters.
If you own several LLCs yourself — no holding company, no parent — the correct word for a combined view of them is "combined," not "consolidated." It sounds like a technicality. It isn't: it's the difference between a real accounting concept and a word that doesn't apply to your structure, and a CPA reading a page that gets it wrong stops trusting everything else on it.
Two different ownership structures, two different words
| Your structure | What it produces | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You personally own several LLCs — brother-sister entities, no entity owns another. | Combined financial statements | Common control. No entity has a controlling financial interest in another, so there's nothing to consolidate. |
| A holding company owns the other entities as subsidiaries. | Consolidated financial statements | Controlling financial interest. This is what ASC 810 actually governs. |
Most owners running a portfolio of small businesses are in the first row. You, a person, hold membership interests in three or four LLCs directly. None of those LLCs owns another. That's common control, not a parent-subsidiary group — which means GAAP consolidation under ASC 810 doesn't apply to you at all, no matter how naturally "consolidated" rolls off the tongue. What you actually have, and what accountants actually call it, is a combined statement: the entities' figures added together, with the transactions between them eliminated so the group total isn't inflated by money that just moved from one of your pockets to another.
If you do have a genuine holding company — one entity that owns the others — then consolidation is the right word for your structure, and the mechanics converge on the same eliminations either way. The distinction is about what you call it and why, not about whether the combined report itself looks any different.
What a combined statement actually is
Every combined report on Nummio — the P&L, the balance sheet — renders the same way a CPA already expects: one column per entity, an eliminations column showing exactly what was netted out and why, and a combined total. The portfolio migration demo runs this live: three real businesses, a management fee and a rent charge between them, and a combined P&L where those two intercompany lines show up in full in each entity's own column and net to zero in the eliminations column — not silently dropped, not hidden, just shown for what they are.
Not a filing
A combined statement is management reporting. It's what you and your CPA look at to understand how the whole portfolio is doing. It is not a return, and nothing about producing one changes how your entities are taxed.
Each pass-through entity in your portfolio still files its own return, on its own schedule — a partnership's 1065, an S corp's 1120-S, a sole proprietorship's Schedule C, each with its own K-1s where they apply. There is no combined tax return for a group of brother-sister LLCs. What lands on your personal return is an aggregation of what each entity's result contributes — through K-1s, Schedule C, and Schedule E — not the combined P&L itself. Nummio's own portfolio tax summary, in the product, states this the same way it's stated here: each business files separately, and the summary is an aggregation for your preparer to work from, not a return itself.
Eliminations stay in the combined view only
The management fee, the rent, the intercompany loan — those are real transactions with real tax consequences in each entity's own separate books. Eliminating them from the combined view doesn't touch what's posted at the entity level; it never could, since posted history in Nummio is insert-only. Elimination is something the combined report computes on top of that history, every time it's rendered, not something that happens to the history itself.
Want to see the eliminations happen on real numbers?
The portfolio migration demo posts three businesses' books and shows the combined P&L with eliminations live, in your browser.