Income statements - multiple businesses

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Quoting Jeff Carneal <jeff-ml at carneal.com>:

>
> I have multiple businesses, each with their set of asset accounts.
> The income accounts to which revenue transfers for each of them are
> common to all the businesses (this is a holdover from some quicken
> limitations).  I would like to be able to do an income statement and
> balance sheet for each business at the end of each calendar (also
> fiscal) year.  I'm having trouble doing this in two ways:

First, each business should have its own data file....

> 1)  Each report takes upwards of 10 minutes to generate
>
> My data file has 7 years worth of data and is somewhat large.  Is
> there a way to speed this up through filters or preferences or
> something?  I really would prefer not to close out my books each year.

Get a faster machine?   Seriously, your data file will grow linearly
over time, so it will take the reports longer and longer to generate.
Granted, it's possible that some of the reports have suboptimal
generation algorithms...  E.g. some of them may be O(n^2) or even
worse, so as your datafile gets larger the reports take even longer!

> To make matters worse, there appears to be no way to set the options
> for a report before generating it.  Thus, I initiate the report, wait
> 10 minutes for it to generate, go to options and set them
> accordingly, apply and wait another 10 minutes.  Am I missing a way
> to skip that first report generation or at least speed it up?

I believe there is an RFE for this.  The way to set the options are
to generate the report, set the options you want, then save that
report configuration as a custom report.   unfortunatelty, no, there's
no way to pre-set the options, and adding that isn't a simple task.

> 2)  I cannot seem to limit the report output based on a particular
> business's originating asset account (or set of accounts)

I'm not surprised.  See above.  Each company should have its own datafile.

> For example, assume the following account structure:
>
> Assets:Biz:Biz-1-Checking
> Assets:Biz:Biz-2-Checking
> Income:Biz:Biz
> Income:Biz:Biz:Some-sub-acct
>
> Thus, if I take in revenue for either Biz-1 or Biz-2 in their
> respective checking accounts, it goes to Income:Biz or one of its
> subaccounts.  I do this because the businesses are related, and in
> Quicken it was all simply categories rather than accounts.
>
> What I need to do is limit the transactions the Income statement
> utilizes for each business to those which originate from that
> particular business's checking account and transfer to the common
> Income account.  Is this possible?

I dont think so.

> If not, is the best way to do it to change all the income accounts
> corresponding to Biz-1:Checking to something like Income:Biz:Biz-1?
> Ala:
>
> Income:Biz:Biz-1-income
> Income:Biz:Biz-1-income:Subacct
> Income:Biz:Biz-2-income
> Income:Biz:Biz-2-income:Subacct

Create separate data files.

> Thanks,
> Jeff

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available