Multiple Company Setup Question

Wm tcnw81 at tarrcity.demon.co.uk
Sat Apr 30 21:47:20 EDT 2016


In article <4796455.BRWZ6TNDmT at calufrax.nottingham.standbyevents.co.uk>
"Maf. King" <maf at chilwell.net> wrote:
>
> 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.

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

Since there are very clear legal seperations I'd say seperate book 
for each property.

> 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.

I wouldn't suggest anyone that hasn't already done a fair bit of db 
work goes for SQL consolidation as a first choice.

Consistent CoA structures for each entity allowing a standard 
balance sheet, income statement, etc and consolidation in a 
spreadsheet would probably be the way to start.

Don: The deciding factors should be how many subsidairies are there 
and how often do you need to consolidate.  If you just want to get 
a sum of the income less the sum of the expenses on a weekly basis 
saved reports and a spreadsheet are the way to go.

-- 
Wm


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