Subquery can't find column from superquery's join

The cause of the problem was identified by @Phil in the comments:

Probably because it's nested too deep

You have 2 layers of nesting and the reference of table e cannot "see" through these 2 layers in MySQL.

Correlated inline subquery can usually be converted to derived tables and then LEFT joined to the other tables in the FROM clause but they have to be turned into uncorrelated (in MySQL. In other DBMS, you could use a LATERAL join or the similar OUTER APPLY.

A first rewrite to get the job done:

SELECT CONCAT_WS( ', ', count(DISTINCT CONCAT(q.emailaddress, '_', e.id)), dv.OneTimeItems ) as AllItems, e.id, LEFT(e.firstname, 1) as voorletter, e.lastname FROM question q LEFT JOIN employee e ON q.employee_id = e.id LEFT JOIN ( SELECT company_id, GROUP_CONCAT(items SEPARATOR '; ') AS OneTimeItems FROM ( SELECT oi.company_id, CONCAT_WS( ': ', oi.item_name, SUM(oi.item_amount) ) items FROM onetime_item oi WHERE oi.date BETWEEN '2015-12-01' AND LAST_DAY('2015-12-01') GROUP BY oi.company_id, oi.item_name ) resulta GROUP BY company_id ) AS dv ON dv.company_id = e.company_id WHERE 1=1 AND YEAR(q.created_at) = '2015' AND MONTH(q.created_at) = '12' GROUP BY e.company_id ; 

Test in SQLfiddle.

Unrelated to the issue comments:

• There is GROUP BY e.company_id while the select list has e.id, LEFT(e.firstname, 1), e.lastname. All these will give arbitrary result from a (more or less random) employee for each company - or even in extremely rare cases arbitrary results from 2 or 3 different employees! MySQL allowed (before 5.7) such bad use of group by that could cause erroneous results. It has been fixed in 5.7 and the default settings would reject this query.

• The condition:

  YEAR(created_at) = '2015' AND MONTH(created_at) = '12' 

  cannot make use of indexes. It's better to rewrite with either BETWEEN if the column is of DATE type of with an inclusive-exclusive range condition, which works flawlessly with any datetime type (DATE, DATETIME, TIMESTAMP) of any precision:

  -- use only when the type is DATE only date BETWEEN '2015-12-01' AND LAST_DAY('2015-12-01') 

  or:

  -- use when the type is DATE, DATETIME or TIMESTAMP created_at >= '2015-12-01' AND created_at < '2016-01-01'