Balance sheet report for multiple accounts

[DaveC49]

I have tried setting up accounts for several entities in one file in Gnucash.
It can be fudged but there is one major problem. 

The top level account has to have an account type even if it is a
placeholder new top level account and that can only be one of Bank, Cash,
Asset, Credit Card, Liability, Stock, Mutual Fund,Income, Expense, Equity,
A/Receivable, A/Payable or Trading. If you assign it as Asset, then the
types of subaccounts become restricted to valid sub- accounts of Asset ,
i.e. Bank, Cash, Asset, Credit Card, Liability, Stock, Mutual Fund,
A/Receivable or A/Payable so one cannot create Equity Income or Expense sub
accounts for a top level account of type Asset. Even declaring the account
as a placeholder does not change this. If one chooses Equity then the
subaccounts have to be of type Equity as well.  This limits the ability to
create accounts for several entities in a single file.

Gnucash is much more flexible than general accounting practice with the sub
account types since one can for example declare a top level account as
A/Receivable or A/Payable whereas in general accounting practice one would
expect A/Receivable to be a sub account of a top level Asset type  account
(similarly with Bank, Cash, Stock, and Trading accounts ( not sure about the
asset status in this case) while A/Payable would be a Liability sub account.
If one views a liability account as an asset contra account, making all
possibilities available under either Asset of Liability account types makes
more sense.

For one set of books to encompass multiple business entities, there would
have to be a new top level account of type "entity" which could have any of
the current top level account types as its child sub-accounts. As a general
practice for business bookkeeping this would not be encouraged, even if
legally allowed by the jurisdiction's legislation, and it may be not legal
as John pointed out, in some jurisdictions. 

It may be  worth considering this for the case where several business
acivities are conducted by the one business, but for management purposes
separate internal reporting is required for each activity, although for
external purposes (tax and financial reporting) it is one business. This is
doable at present in Gnucash by creating sub accounts for each activity
under the major top level account types and structuring the reports to only
include the specific sub  accounts for a given activity but requires some
customisation of reports..

As mentioned in another post there is no problem having multiple files open
and cutting and pasting between them. Strictly a transfer of funds from one
business to another would require the funds to be recorded as drawings on
the owners equity in the business contributing the funds and as owner's
contributions to equity in the business receiving the funds.

David Cousens



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