personal and business

[Dave T]

On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 4:48 PM, Mike or Penny Novack <
stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> wrote:

>
>  Thanks for your clear description. That's exactly the thing I want to
>> avoid.
>> Using MS Money Personal & Business allowed me to avoid that double work
>> and
>> I am hopeful to find an equally efficient solution that involves GnuCash.
>> Shane's reply seems to point me in the right direction... I'm designing a
>> chart of accounts now (although my lack of experience doing such things is
>> giving rise to a lot of questions and I'm not able to refer to the
>> standard
>> recommendations).
>> Regards,
>> Dave
>>
>>
> Stupid question on my part. WHY would you want to have one set of books
> covering two entities? Yes I understand this could reduce the work when
> entering those (few?) transactions where these split between the entities.
> But I would think that far outweighed by the consideration that being
> required to show the books of  the business would force you to disclose your
> personal books. Violates the rule about never voluntarily disclosing what
> you don't have to.
>
> You aren't required to have personal books so under few conditions can be
> required to produce them.
>
> Michael
>

This may help you understand where I'm coming from. I don't use this data to
create my own tax returns. I only use this to send (informal) reports to my
accountant. From those reports my accountant creates the real set of books.
And I only send what my accountant requires. I mostly just send categorized
transactions and beginning/ending account balances. I do not do anything
with depreciation, for example.

My goal is to do the minimum amount of bookkeeping I can, in the most
efficient way I can do it. MS Money Personal & Business met my objectives
(although it was not very good software). Now I want to meet my objectives
with GnuCash. (Basically, anything that isn't business-related can just get
deleted in the end, but I need an efficient way to gather all the
potentially business-related transactions and then sort them out without
typing stuff in twice.)

And I welcome more suggestions.