Multiple Company Setup Question

[Maf. King]

On Friday, 29 April 2016 19:01:07 BST Don Ireland wrote:
> Hi All.  I'm trying to find and accounting solution for my real estate
> investing business and could use some advice.
> 
> For asset protection purposes, each rental property is wholly owned by
> an LLC.  Each LLC is wholly owned by my Solo 401(k) trust (the trust is
> the single member of each LLC).  I am the trustee for the Trust and the
> manager for each LLC.
> 
> I need to document all transactions for property a separately from those
> for property b and so on.
> 
> If I were to use Quickbooks, I'd use a separate company file.  Whats the
> best method with gnuCash?  Assuming that I'd use a separate file for
> each company, is there a way for the parent company to automatically
> show the child companies as assets?  Since gnuCash "knows" the value of
> each companys' assets and liabilities, I think one could say that it
> "knows" the value of each company.

Hi Don,

Welcome to the list.

The usual advice is to keep each legal entity in its own file.

I don't know of any way to have GC know the contents of multiple files and be 
able to give you an overview of the trust's worth.  You might be able to do 
something with saved report configurations that you run and export to a 
spreadsheet which does the  aggregation for you. 

The other possibility is to do some reporting outside of GC if you are in any 
way fluent in SQL.  There is a user on here by the name of Wm. who conducted 
some SQL experiments he had carried out a year or two ago, I think he was 
trying to combine several files into one "parent company" report.  Have a 
search of the list archives for SQL Balance sheet around late Dec 2014 to mid 
Jan 2015, there are several possible threads of relevance.

Of Course, you *could* use a single file and set the Chart of accounts up in 
such a way that each property is self-contained as sub-books, but I think that 
you would send up with a confusing set of similarly-named accounts and hence 
much more scope for errors.  Depends if the total separation or global view is 
more important to you, and of course, your local laws may have a preference, 
too!

HTH,
Maf.