Using multiple accounts in single file

[DaveC49]

Hi Matt,

I have recently moved from having separate files ( at a time when my wife
had a business and our tax affairs were more complicated ) to now using a
single file (we are both retired and our tax affairs are now relatively
simple). I still need to keep track of somethings separately for tax
purposes however.

I do this by having separate placeholder accounts for myself, my wife and
joint assets for example under current assets. I also do this for income and
expenses, liabilities and to a lesser extent equity. I also have under those
basic placeholders subaccounts for taxable and non-taxable income and
similarly with expenses as both my wife and I have income streams which are
taxable and others which are non-taxable.

Assets-|                              |-----Me-|-Investment Account
          |-------CurrentAssets-|            |-Savings Account
          |                              |
                                         |- Wife--|-Savings Account
                                         |           |- Investment Account
                                         |
                                         |----Joint-|-Cheque Account

It is hard to define a universal best practice for personal accounts as
unlike business accounting they are not as strongly influenced by external
reporting and legislative requirements. The main thing is that your account
structure reflects your personal situation (assets, liabilities, income
streams, expenditures) and any external reporting, generally only tax for
personal accounts.

The main reason I went to a single file was that it made it easier to  get a
quick picture of our overall financial position without having to combine
reports from two files and as Maf has pointed out you can use the filtering
abilities to be more selective in the reporting and even generate individual
custom reports. You can also set which accounts are included in a report in
the Edit->Report Options  dialog which can be accessed once you are
displaying a given report. Once you have a report customised to suit your
needs you can save its configuration as a custom report for future use.

David Cousens





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David Cousens
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