handling multiple entities in single book : issue with trading accounts

Wm wm+gnc at tarrcity.demon.co.uk
Sat Jan 17 09:50:25 EST 2015


Tue, 13 Jan 2015 06:34:46 
<CAB2pxDuwUD_EuG8+WARVPxTB6phFtw00g9ojxOfK9wK1Su+a_g at mail.gmail.com> 
Sébastien de Menten <sdementen at gmail.com>

[do not try this at home unless you know what you are doing!]
[do not read further unless you are confident about your backups!]

Are you sitting comfortably?  Read on ...

>I am handling in a single book all accounts and transactions of my couple,
>essentially, myself, my wife and a "common" assets (whatever we put in
>common).
>I have created a typical account structure for each of the 3 "persons"
>adding the name of the person just before the 1st level, i.e.:
>
>Assets / My wife / Current Assets / Checking Account
>Assets / Me / Current Assets / Checking Account
>Assets / Common / Current Assets / Checking Account
>
>and this for all accounts (equity, expenses, etc).

Is this right?  Shouldn't it be

Assets / Common
Assets / Common / Seb partner
Assets / Common / Seb

gnc cannot decide on your personal asset allocation but it does allow 
you something most accounting programs don't which is you can move a 
branch to another part of the tree through the trick of deletion, I'd 
have thought you'd have utilised and realised that by now, S!

i.e. if you want to change the view, do so, the transactions in the 
accounts stay the same and the significant reports should just work 
(don't merge accounts unless you mean to).

>I can then  see the balance per person as well as the overall flow from my
>wife and myself to the "common" part as well as double check transfers
>between our accounts => any better ideas

see above, the fund flow would be visible in the rolled up Common

> (than creating different books) to
>handle this ?

if you've been following general conversation here, in some cases a 
separate (or at the very least virtually separate) book *must* be 
created in order to comply with legislative and funding requirements, 
this accounting problem is common to your case above as well as 
companies with subsidiaries and most obviously restricted funds and so 
on.

You are clearly a good thinker, have you tried any of my SQL yet or are 
you determined to plough the furrow of writing to gnc files when people 
are saying *LOUD* "don't do that, Sebastien, we aren't sure what will 
happen!" ?

>However, once I use the "trading accounts" options, gnucash creates
>accounts like
>
>Trading / CURRENCY / EUR
>Trading / PCX / DIA

which is right, it is for the book as a whole, think about it for a 
moment, please

>whereas i would like
>
>Trading / Me / CURRENCY / EUR
>Trading / Me / PCX / DIA
>Trading / My wife / CURRENCY / EUR
>Trading / Common / CURRENCY / EUR
>
>to avoid mixing unrealized P&Ls. Any way to tell gnucash to do that (e.g.
>assign manually a trading account per STOCK account) ?

See other posts in this thread.  If you haven't read and understood it 
all Trading accounts are Equity. Work from there.  To make it obvious a 
gnc book has an amount of equity, that can be added to or subtracted 
from externally.  Everything else happens within "the book" / "set of 
accounts" / "gyejeong ui seoljeong" (korean).

When you are done I'd like to talk to you some more because we 
definitely share some ideas.

-- 
Wm...



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