Dividing accounts in multiple branches

[John Van Ostrand]

In your original post you had mentioned possibly using a different file for
each product. I'd recommend against that. Double entry bookkeeping breaks
down between sets of books. If the inter-company accounts are not kept
perfectly in sync you'll have a horrible time reconciling. It can be done
but it requires meticulous record keeping. Then you have the task of
consolidating the books to create a company-wide report.


On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 8:11 AM, Mike or Penny Novack <
stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> wrote:

> Dieter wrote:
>
>  Thanks for the fast reply,
>>
>> I realize that this isn't the common method of double bookkeeping.
>>
>>  This is NOT just a matter of your particular reporting requirements.
> Normal double entry bookkeeping groups income accounts together and expense
> accounts together which can make it difficult (from just the raw reports)
> to see the profitability or lack thereof of particular events (say an
> organization runs a number of fundraising events as some of the non-profits
> for which I am treasurer or on the finance committee does).
>
> BUT (a very big but) you are not limited to raw reports. You can consider
> those a DATA from which you (or your accountant) then prepares the final
> reports that get presented to the board or filed with some governmental
> agency.
>
> Back when I began as treasurer with one of those organizations and gnucash
> I asked the accountant person who assisted me "should I write some custom
> reports?" (I am a retired senior analyst, a few hundred thousand lines of
> financial software in my day) and he said, "Mike, don't bother. Just give
> me the raw reports and I'll deal with it. Like any other accountant I have
> my favorite editing application I use for producing the "good copy"
> reports.". If  you look at the typical annual report of an organization
> you'll see more stuff than just what might come directly from the
> bookkeeping program. Things like fixed text describing the accounting
> principles used (here non-profits are allowed some choices in reporting but
> should specify which options they are using) plus all the annotations
> explaining unusual amounts (like: this year's annual meeting appears high
> because includes an invoice from the previous year's meeting that did not
> get settled till this year -- or vice versa). So if you wanted the final
> report to come out of the bookkeeping package it would need a full power
> editor and why reinvent the wheel?
>
> Understand what I am saying? Can you see how if the accounts were
> (initially) grouped the way normal for double entry bookkeeping and you had
> the standard reports produced by the package you could take the (exported)
> reports and regroup as your heart desires using your favorite editing
> software. Many of us face this problem as in any case double entry
> bookkeeping allows just ONE tree structure (chart of accounts) and
> sometimes we want to present the data organized in multiple ways.
>
> HOWEVER -- I did describe how you could group as you wanted in gnucash.
> Just ignore the difference between "income" and "expense" using just ONE of
> these. To do that think in terms of "debit" and "credit" (left and right
> sides of a ledger account) ignoring the column labels gnucash is using to
> make things easier for newbies who never learned bookkeeping back in the
> pre computer pen and ink on paper days using blank (lined but unlabeled)
> ledger paper. IMHO that would be harder for you to do correctly than modern
> standard and regroup from the raw data but it's up to you.
>
> Michael
>
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-- 
John Van Ostrand
At large on sabbatical