[GNC] Adding A Business Activity (and integrating with old)

[devaps at asia.com]

Eric,

I started out the same way, using gnucash for personal books and added my sole proprietorship business activity at a later date. 

Like you, even if I setup a new business bank account, I’d invariably have some expenses that would involve apportioning part of the expense to business side of things. It’s much easier to do this in a single book. If you wish, you can segregate the books, but it will constantly involve splitting business portion of the transactions to be duplicated in both books. If you do this, you would have to split the business portion of transactions to an equity account in personal books and source one side of transactions from a similar equity account in the business books. Given the tedium in maintaining copies of transactions in multiple books, I chose to keep it in a single book.

It’s easy enough to create an account hierarchy to include business side of things in your personal books and at report generation time, include the appropriate set of accounts for business or personal income or balance sheet information. 


There may be a case to separate the books if you anticipate selling your business at a future date, but that effort is worth it only if the business is large enough to spin off at a later date. Not worth its while for sole proprietorship. 

You can still separate the books at a later date (say if you register an LLP or a private company), if you deem it necessary to maintain separate books at that time. 

Cheers,
Deva

—————————————————————
Date: Sat, 20 May 2023 14:21:15 -0500
From: "Eric H. Bowen" <eric at ehbowen.net>
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: [GNC] Adding A Business Activity (and integrating with old)
Message-ID: <12b93fed-70cf-b7a6-a6a7-ca3e083d174c at ehbowen.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

I've been using GnuCash for personal expenses and for a home-based hobby 
business for the past several years now. I'm about to add another 
business activity which will be more serious (I'm self-publishing a 
book). I'm planning to open a separate business banking account for this 
activity and I want to use an entirely separate GnuCash book to keep 
track of income and expenses. Note: This will be a sole proprietorship 
(at least for now) as is my current hobby business.

My question is: How do I integrate this with my current GnuCash 
register? It will be more than a year before I generate any 
(significant) income, even if things go well, so there's going to be a 
lot of crossover and funds transferred from my personal accounts, both 
cash and credit. There are also other items, such as telephone and 
Internet service, which can/should be expensed across both activities. 
I'm also wanting to track investment and net equity in this activity in 
the event that I eventually sell out to an established publisher or else 
formally incorporate the business.

I can/will speak with the accountant that I'm using for his 
recommendations, but he's completely unfamiliar with GnuCash; when I 
mentioned it his reaction was, "What...?" So I want to see how this can 
and should be done under the GnuCash interface.