[GNC] How to best set up account structure for multiple Tax IDs?

[Jens Dill]

I'm new to GnuCash. I need an accounting package because I am now in the 
position of having four different tax identification numbers (and thus 
four different tax returns to prepare). Briefly, the situation is that 
I'm recently widowed. My wife and I had a living trust, and on her death 
the trust split into two parts: the Survivor's trust, which is money I 
can use for any purpose, and the Marital trust, which is set aside to 
guarantee that her share of the estate has a chance of getting to her 
heirs. The Marital trust has its own tax ID. I've also purchased an 
acrigultural property, on which I plan to build a non-farm business and 
continue farming the remainder of the land. I've set up both the farm 
and the business as separate sole proprietorship LLCs, each with its own 
tax ID.

So I have at least 5 pots of money: the two trusts, the two businesses 
and my personal funds (cash, bank accounts, and IRAs). Each has its own 
liabilities, assets, income, expenses, and equity. I've rejected the 
"simple" solution of having 5 different GnuCash files because it's all 
my money and I know I'm going to be doing a lot of moving money back and 
forth between the different pots. For instance, it makes no sense to 
have separate checking accounts or credit cards for the businesses at 
this stage, so all business expenses will be paid with personal or trust 
money. And the net income from the businesses and the trusts is personal 
income, so goes back into my bank account.

If I set things up with the traditional 5 top-level accounts, I have to 
create 5 nearly identical sub-accounts under each in order to divide 
things up. It might be better to make one top-level "account" for each 
entity, and set up liabilities, assets, income, expenses, and equity as 
sub-accounts of each. But you can't do that, because the top-level 
"accounts" are not really accounts in the sense of having an account 
type. If I assign them an account type, which I am required to do, I'm 
restricted in the types of subaccounts I can put under them. There is no 
account type that allows all other account types among its subaccounts.

So it seems I can only go with the first plan: set up the traditional 5 
top-level accounts (liabilities, assets, income, expenses, and equity) 
and divide each into a subaccount for each entity. GnuCash seems to have 
no problem with using the same name for a subaccount in two different 
branches of the account tree, which is helpful. So this will be 
time-consuming to set up (can't use the Druid, and there does not seem 
to be a way to copy and paste account subtrees) but it should work. I 
have not yet investigated whether I can get individual entity reports by 
selecting, say, all accounts with the second level having the same name, 
but I presume I can eventually make that work.

My questions:

 1. Has anyone else faced this situation?
 2. What solutions did they find?
 3. How did their solution work?
 4. Is my approach sensible?
 5. Is it likely to work?

And a final observation. It would be nice if the documentation spelled 
out somewhere the purpose and uses of the "Account Code". I don't 
remember any explicit references to it in the Tutorial, and there is no 
description of its use in the Help pages. All I can find is some oblique 
references in the Wiki and related documents that it can be used to 
create a sort order for siblings within the account hierarchy, and that 
the order is determined by treating the code as a base-36 number with 
digits "0-9A-Z". From this I can infer that the account code must be 
case-insensitive and that punctuation marks are either illegal, ignored, 
or cause weird effects. It would be nice if this were explicitly 
documented. And if there are any other uses of the Account Code besides 
sorting, those should be explained somewhere as well. If it is only used 
for sorting purposes, perhaps it should be renamed to suggest that use. 
Otherwise it is a puzzle for someone trying to set up an account for the 
first time.

                        -- Jens