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Five companies, one dashboard

You hold stakes in five companies. Your "dashboard" is five browser tabs and a spreadsheet that is two weeks behind. Managing financial visibility across multiple entities should not require a personal analyst, but for most investors and holding managers it does today.

Moonlight is being built as the alternative. The product is in active development, and the multi-workspace, multi-project structure described below is what the team is shipping against. Some pieces (cross-workspace dashboards in particular) are still on the way; the per-workspace experience is in pilot use today.

The multi-entity mess​

You have five companies. Each one runs on its own accounting system. Each sends you reports in a different format, monthly, quarterly or whenever someone remembers.

Company A drops a Google Sheet with categories that do not match Company B's. Company C's accountant sends a QuickBooks P&L export as a PDF. Company D's founder pastes numbers into a Notion page. Company E's CFO sends a 40-slide deck where the relevant data sits on slides 12, 27 and 34.

You, or someone you pay, copy numbers from all five into a master spreadsheet. You normalise categories. You align time periods. You flag entries that look off and email someone to check.

By the time the consolidation is done, it is stale. Next month the cycle starts again.

The spreadsheet is the symptom​

The deeper issue is that each company runs as an island. Their financial data lives inside their own systems, in their own formats, with their own definitions of what counts as "marketing" or "operations" or "R&D".

No spreadsheet fixes that. You are patching a structural gap with manual labour.

What you need is a system where every company records its finances the same way, in the same place, with the same structure, so you can put two companies side by side without translating between them.

Workspaces in place of the master spreadsheet​

In Moonlight, each company is a workspace. The data inside each workspace uses the same model: entries with types, amounts, parties, projects, documents and tags.

Company A's workspace has income and expense entries that look exactly like Company E's. Categories come from a consistent tagging system and party types, not from however each company's accountant has organised their chart of accounts.

You switch between workspaces from the sidebar. There is no merging, no normalising. The data is structured the same way because it entered the system through the same interface.

Cross-company comparison becomes a filter, not a project​

When the data structure is consistent, comparison is the easy part.

For "which company is most profitable this quarter?", you open each workspace's reports tab and read income minus expenses, by project if you want.

For "which project has the highest contractor spend?", the party breakdown in each workspace shows who gets paid and how much.

For "which company has the weakest financial hygiene?", the completeness score is the answer. A workspace where 80% of entries have full documentation is in better shape than one at 40%, and you see this without an audit.

For "where is money moving between entities?", the Sankey flow view shows shared services, internal transfers and intercompany loans. Circular dependencies become visible instead of inferred.

A note on roadmap: today these comparisons happen one workspace at a time. A consolidated cross-workspace view for investors and holding managers is on the near-term plan and will sit on top of the same data model.

Each company keeps its own accounting​

Moonlight is not trying to merge your companies into one ledger. Each workspace connects to its own QuickBooks (or its own manual setup, for teams that do not use an external system). The accountant for Company A works inside Company A's workspace and sees nothing else.

You see all of them. The accountant sees theirs. The founder sees theirs. Everyone works in their scope, and the data is structured so you can read across scopes when you need to.

Connection routing handles the messy cases. If Company C has two QuickBooks entities, one for domestic and one for international, each project in the workspace routes to the right connection. The accountant reviews per connection. You see the combined picture.

The scale problem gets worse, not better​

Two companies are manageable with spreadsheets. Five is painful. Ten becomes a job in itself.

Every new company in your portfolio adds another reporting format, another communication cadence, another person you depend on to "pull the numbers." The overhead grows with the portfolio, and the quality of your consolidated view drops as you add entities.

In Moonlight, a new company is a new workspace. Same structure, same access model, same reports. Your fifth company takes the same effort to monitor as your first. Your tenth company takes the same effort as your fifth. The operational cost of visibility stays roughly flat as the portfolio grows.

What this means for your team​

If you have an investment analyst spending 20 hours a month consolidating portfolio financials, that work shrinks to near zero once the data is consolidated by structure rather than by hand.

If you are a solo investor doing this on weekends, you get the weekends back. You open the app, check each workspace, and you know where things stand.

If you run a family office with LP reporting, the per-entity financial data is always current. The quarterly LP report becomes a synthesis exercise, not a data-collection exercise.