handling multiple entities in single book : issue with trading accounts

[Sébastien de Menten]

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 3:50 PM, Wm <wm+gnc at tarrcity.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> Tue, 13 Jan 2015 06:34:46 <CAB2pxDuwUD_EuG8+WARVPxTB6phFtw00g9ojxOfK9wK1Su
> +a_g at mail.gmail.com> Sébastien de Menten <sdementen at gmail.com>
>
>
>  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
>
> Why ?
I want to have in a single gnucash document (file or SQL DB)  Books for
different persons/entities.
Why not having separate files for each person ? for personal multiple
reasons :I want to have in a single place the global view of all persons, I
want to be able to book in a single transaction transfer between accounts
from different persons/books, I want to define the commodities in a single
place, I want to share the commodity prices, I want to have the same
reports, etc.

I do not think it is possible to have multiple books in a single file.
Therefore, I wanted to "emulate" the multiple books structure in some
gnucash compatible way.
The first is to set, below the root account of gnucash 3 other root
accounts (person 1, person 2 and common 1+2) to get the following account
tree

ROOT
ROOT       person 1
ASSET     person 1:Assets
LIABILITY person 1:Liabilities
INCOME     person 1:Income
EXPENSE   person 1:Expenses
ROOT       person 2
ASSET     person 2:Assets
LIABILITY person 2:Liabilities
INCOME     person 2:Income
EXPENSE   person 2:Expenses
ROOT       common 1+2
ASSET     common 1+2:Assets
LIABILITY common 1+2:Liabilities
INCOME     common 1+2:Income
EXPENSE   common 1+2:Expenses


While it works at first sight (see sample "multiple_roots.gnucash" in
attachment), I fear Gnucash may not support that 100% down the road.

So the second way is to move the person one way down the tree structure:

ROOT
ASSET     Assets
ASSET     Assets:person 1
ASSET     Assets:person 2
ASSET     Assets:common 1+2
LIABILITY Liabilities
LIABILITY Liabilities:person 1
LIABILITY Liabilities:person 2
LIABILITY Liabilities:common 1+2
INCOME     Income
INCOME     Income:person 1
INCOME     Income:person 2
INCOME     Income:common 1+2
EXPENSE   Expenses
EXPENSE   Expenses:person 1
EXPENSE   Expenses:person 2
EXPENSE   Expenses:common 1+2


which is what I described in my original email ... with the point about
Trading account not being able to be split among persons.
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