One LLC, multiple services, or multiple LLCs?

You do not need separate DBAs (Doing Business As) for individual services. It can be as simple as one LLC and multiples services/products. Think of it like a hardware store. You go in and buy different products from the same store. Same idea.

I don't know how they do their accounting but I assume they track them separately.

You can have multiple LLCs but that's kind of a lot of overhead.

There is really no advantage to separate LLCs unless one of your products will have a greater liability than the others. In that case, you want to protect the other revenue streams from the more risky product line. That's pretty much the only advantage. You can track revenue for each product just by setting up the accounting correctly.

You may want multiple LLCs for each service if the people involved in each are slightly different, and if the equity distribution is a little different for each service.

For example, if you give 10% equity to the developer of each service, and you have 5 services, you could join them under a single LLC if the same developer was working on all 5 services. If you had 5 developers, one per service, however, then you may want to split that LLC so that each developer is being compensated from an equity POV properly.

Not taking into account tax and legal issues but looking at it purely from an accounting record keeping perspective, if you have different owners and different equity %s for different products, it is much easier to keep track of all that in separate companies. Theoretically, it can be done in one entity but it can become an accounting nightmare.

I've been asking myself the same question. Joey specifically mentioned DBA's. I too want to have an LLC parent for multiple web sites. I expect to get checks written for the web sites. In fact, I prefer it for branding purposes. I want the face to the customer to be the brand name of the website. I think Joey may have been asking for the same reason.

To achieve this branding advantage, I believe we will be required to file Fictitious Name Statements. I just found this page http://www.business.gov/register/business-name/dba.html. I read the California requirements.

Let us consider an established business that has one or more revenue streams.

You asked how does a company track multiple products using one company structure?

When a company is setup and once it starts growing, the best practice is to setup chart of account structure. In this chart of accounts there are some basic accounts such as "Income", "Cost of Goods Sold", "Expense", etc and within this main accounts you can create sub-accounts.

For e.g Microsoft, they sell Excel, Word, office and also consulting.

Microsoft could create two new accounts of "Income" type such as "Software Income" and "Consulting Income". And within "Software Income" they could create sub-accounts such as "Excel income", "Word Income" and so on.

So a single company can track multiple product lines.

In big corporations an account number is made of several things such as Cost center, site or geography, project, account and any other entity they may wish to do their accounting.

So it is not required to setup multiple LLCs. Big companies do it for several other reasons like tax, different countries - legislation, subsidiary etc.

Once you go beyond single product or when Excel becomes too tedious to manage your balance sheet then it is a good time to use some kind of accounting package like Quickbooks. In fact you start using some package the day you start your LLC. Quickbooks can handle all small business requirements including multiple product lines.