Multi-company accounting

[marcus.wolschon at googlemail.com]

On Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:07:26 -0500, Mike or Penny Novack
<stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> wrote:
> Conor McGarry wrote:
> 
>>This new "organizational" account type would be perfect.  Could it be
>>developed?
>>  
>>
> I'll jump in here as business analyst?
> 
> There are TWO issues that look like one only because solving one of 
> these in a certain way (if were possible) might eliminate the pressing 
> need for the other.
> 
> 1) In the special case scenario where one bookkeeper just happens to be 
> keeping the books for two business entities, identify on the fly any 
> transaction that happens to be between these two entities and generate 
> the corresponding transaction. I will come back to why this probably is 
> impossible.
> 
> 2) In the above situation, have an automated reconciliation program that 
> can spot when a transaction is between two or more of these companies 
> and check that a corresponding entry exists in the other set of books. 
> Eliminate the work of doing this reconciliation by hand even if the 
> transactions have to be entered individually.

Hello Conor,

can you explain why you think these 2 are requirements at all?
With a forest of organizational (OU in LDAP-Terms) accounts under the
root-account
transactions between 2 organizations are simply transactions between
2 accounts in gnucash. No need for any "automated reconciliation program".
It's simply the same, balanced transaction with one split in one company
and another split in another company.

Having an OU-account would also allow to keep books of one company
and your private finances in one file when these two share things like
bank-accounts. (A common case for almost any freelancer or private citizen
doing a small side-business.)

Can anyone test if current and older gnucash-releases crash when
encountering
a "root"-account inside a root-account? It is as simple as adding a few
lines in the xml-file and loading it in gnucash.

Currently I solve this issue by having sub-accounts for each company
below my expenses, income, sales-tax,... -accounts.
I cannot use the gnucash-reports with this setups but then I never used
them anyway. With an OU-account the reports could work by selecting
the one or many OU-accounts to work on instead of using the root-account.


Marcus