Balance sheet report for multiple accounts

Larry Evans cppljevans at suddenlink.net
Tue Sep 27 11:28:08 EDT 2016


On 09/27/2016 09:18 AM, Mike or Penny Novack wrote:
> 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.
>
So, for you, it's better to ease the performance of a rare operation
vs a frequent operation?  I'd think the opposite would be better.
(I assume selling an entity is rare as compared to producing balance
sheet reports).




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