Balance sheet report for multiple accounts

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 9/27/2016 12:40 AM, DaveC49 wrote:
> I have tried setting up accounts for several entities in one file in Gnucash.
> It can be fudged but there is one major problem.

> 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.
No, you are confusing the structure of the books with the reports that 
can be produced. The initial question was about producing BOTH 1) 
balance sheets for all entities and 2) a balance sheet for all of them 
combined

Under Assets create children Entity1, Entity2, etc. Similarly for 
Liabilities and Equity. You can do this for Income and Expenses too 
(these are ACTUALLY "temporary" accounts of fundamental type Equity).

Now the asset accounts of Entity1 go under that parent, of Entity2 under 
that parent, etc. To produce a Balance Report for the overall 
combination simply run the Balance Report unmodified. To get the Balance 
Sheet of Entity1, include JUST the accounts related to Entity1 (all that 
have an Entity1 parent as ancestor).  Same for Entity2, etc.

BUT --- even if each of these businesses were unincorporated and owned 
by a self proprietor there is a good reason why I (for one) would have 
separate books for each in spite of the small amount of added work. That 
is because were you to be considering the sale of one of these entities, 
easier to hand over a set of books of JUST that entity for inspection by 
a prospective buyer.

Michael D Novack