[GNC] Does GnuCash have an easy way to track subsidiaries of companies within one account?

[Adrien Monteleone]

You’ll want to find out what the legal requirements are for your jurisdiction. Usually, separate companies have to keep separate books.

Even if you are allowed to put them in one book, doing so might be more work than the present inconvenience.

There are three approaches I’m aware of:

1. Create separate account trees for each business
2. Create sub-accounts for each business all in the same tree
3. Use some sort of tagging system in the Description, Notes, or Memo fields and then use those tags in filters when running reports.

The maintenance on 1 & 2 can be a bit much.
#3 is doable, but not all needed reports support filtering. You might have a convoluted process to get the reports you need isolated to each entity.

Note, you’ll likely need either a third account tree or three sub-accounts if you take routes 1 or 2 because you also have the parent entity to consider.

Also note, it should be possible to have multiple books open at once. So you can cut down on the clicks considerably. (how you achieve this is different per OS)

Regards,
Adrien

> On Apr 21, 2020 w17d112, at 7:15 PM, Jeff <jeff at iwebss.com> wrote:
> 
>   So is there a way to track expenses related to different companies from
>   within the same gnucash file?
> 
>   For example we have two companies that are subsidiaries of another
>   company. We are constantly transfering money back and forth, so would
>   be nice if I could do it all in one transaction instead of having to
>   show deposit in one file and then open seperate file for other company
>   and show the withdrawl.
> 
>   Thanks