GNUcash setup

[Sébastien de Menten]

Adrien,

This thread
https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2016-September/066879.html
talks about a similar topic. I have posted some "experimental hacks" on it
to have a book with multiple root accounts. But far from guaranteed to work
properly in gnucash.

Sébastien

On Mar 3, 2018 02:02, "Adrien Monteleone" <adrien.monteleone at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Thanks Dave,
>
> To clarify, what I was suggesting was this:
>
> Assets
> Assets:Personal
> Assets:Entity1
> Assets:Entity2
>
> with appropriate sub-accounts under each.
>
> In line with this you’d also have:
>
> Expenses
> Expenses:Personal
> Expenses:Entity1
> Expenses:Entity2
>
> with appropriate sub-accounts under each, and so on for Revenue and then
> Liabilities and Equity as needed.
>
> Each of those ’second levels’ should probably be marked as placeholders to
> avoid a mess.
>
> The other alternative would be this:
>
> Assets
> Assets:Current Assets:Checking
> Assets:Current Assets:Checking:Personal
> Assets:Current Assets:Checking:Entity1
> Assets:Current Assets:Checking:Entity2
>
> That is, if such actual real accounts exist for each entity. The same
> would go for liabilities and Equity would most likely ALL be under
> Personal, so no need for separate accounts.
>
> For expenses, this would be the alternate format:
>
> Expenses
> Expenses:Utilities
> Expenses:Utilities:Electricity
> Expenses:Utilities:Electricity:Personal
> Expenses:Utilities:Electricity:Entity1
> Expenses:Utilities:Electricity:Entity2
>
> with the individual subs being their respective percentages allowed to be
> deducted on the tax return. (or more likely, for that particular expense
> type, just leave everything personal and calculate the percentage at tax
> time off the main expense, which is personal)
>
> Some expenses might only be for each of the business entities or one of
> the other, so not necessarily all expense categories would have entity
> sub-accounts.
>
> In the second set of examples, the level just above the entities should
> probably be marked a place-holder.
>
> Otherwise, yes, you’d have to keep separate books for each and figure out
> how to handle ‘paying yourself’ according to your local tax laws. You’d
> also have to figure out your itemized deductions a bit differently, but
> separate books would also give you separate ‘loss or gain from business
> activity’ numbers.
>
> I’ve seen prior discussions showing both these methods with respect to
> rental property tracking. All properties are part of the same legal entity
> and so should all be on the same statements and return, but the owner
> wanted to track their profitability individually.
>
> Personally, I keep everything in one book and don’t separate entities at
> all because I don’t have individual concerns I need to analyze. But I do
> track separate “revenue streams” for various work.
>
>
> Regards,
> Adrien
>
> > On Mar 2, 2018, at 6:26 PM, DaveC49 <davidcousens at bigpond.com> wrote:
> >
> > Ken, Adrien
> > Just a quick note re "separate account trees for each business".
> >
> > I have experimnted to try to do this within the one set of books (i.e.
> file)
> > in Gnucash and have never found a way of doing it.
> >
> > My problem has always been creating an entity level top account as there
> is
> > no top level account of type entity in the Gnucash structure which can
> have
> > the other major account types (i.e. Asset, Liability, Equity, Income,
> > Expense) as the type of its sub accounts.
> >
> > The account type of a top level account is restricted to be one of {Bank,
> > Cash, Asset, Credit Card, Liabilty, Stock, Mutual Fund, Income, Expense,
> > Equity, A/Receivable, A/Payable,or Trading}. Having made a choice of the
> top
> > level account (e.g. Asset),the choice of account type for a subaccount is
> > restricted to types in the Asset and Liability classes , i.e.{Bank, Cash,
> > Asset, Credit Card, Liability, Stock, Mutual Fund, A/Receivable,
> A/Payable}.
> > If the top level account is of type Liability, the choices are
> restricted to
> > the same list. If the top level account is an Equity account type, its
> sub
> > accounts can only be of type Equity. Expense and Income class top level
> > accounts can only have a type for the subaccounts of {Income, Expense}.
> This
> > precludes setting up multiple entity structures with the entities as
> > separate top level accounts with their own sub trees.
> >
> > I think this is by design and that the expected strategy is to use
> separate
> > files for separate entity.
> >
> > I have adopted the second strategy you mentioned of having "entity"
> > subaccounts under each of the major top level classes {Asset,Libility,
> > Equity, Income, Expenses} to separate my wife's, mine and a few minor
> > business ventures we operate jointly or separately. It works OK, but
> > increases the likelihood of putting a transaction in the wrong account
> and
> > the balance sheets and income statements are not ideal but easily
> rearranged
> > once generated. The main distinction for me is that none of these
> ventures
> > files a separate tax return and they are basically at the hobby level
> since
> > we retired.
> >
> > David
> >
> >
> >
> > -----
> > David Cousens
> > --
> > Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-
> f1415819.html
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