[GNC] two instances on different books

[G R Hewitt]

I agree with Stan's scenario. In a former life, the company I was working
for had two companies in the same set of books.
One was to do with running a holiday park, the other the entertainment side
- there was a tax advantage to this.
So I had separate nominals for the entertainment part with their own
department number and reports were built
so that separate P&L/BS etc., could be run. This was done using Sage Line
50 and worked very well.
The core process of GnuCash is similar to that of Sage, if you exclude
inventory etc., that Sage has, and so it would not be difficult to do this
with GnuCash.

It is certainly a lot easier than trying to run two books that have to have
the same transactions, this is just doubling up your work load
and prone to error.

GRH

On Wed, 14 Aug 2024 at 16:59, Stan Brown (using GC 4.14) <
stan+gc at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> On 2024-08-14 08:35, Brook Milligan via gnucash-user wrote:
> > I have a situation in which I have to manage a pair of books, one from
> the perspective of each side of some of the transactions.  An example would
> be if I am managing books for both a company and a customer, but in my case
> the two entities are much more closely coupled than suggested by that
> example.  Because some (many) of the transactions must be entered in both
> books yet refer to the same activity, I was thinking that having both open
> at once would allow immediate checking that transactions match, simply by
> looking from one window to the other.
>
> If these two entities are all that "closely coupled", why have them in
> separate books? If they're in the same book, it is much easier to make
> sure that both sides of a transaction between them are entered correctly.
>
> The paragraph below is just off the top of my head. The subject of two
> entities in one book has been discussed here before, and others' ideas
> on that are probably better than mine.
>
> You can set up a single chart of accounts in one book, with some sort of
> unique short tag in each account name to show which entity it belongs
> to. (XX and YY are possible choices, since they are certain never to
> occur in account names in English.) You would create and save report
> configurations that select only the Entity 1 tag or only the Entity 2
> tag. Or you could create two top-level accounts, Entity 1 and Entity 2,
> with Entity 1 Assets, Entity 1 Liabilities, and so on under Entity 1,
> and similarly (but not necessarily all the same subaccounts) under Entity
> 2.
>
> Stan Brown
> Tehachapi, CA, USA
> https://BrownMath.com/
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