Malcolm, As others have said you really need professional advice. It will depend upon your local legislation and how your business affairs are structured whether you need to maintain separate books for your business activities or not. What follows is an attempt to outline how GnuCash might be used and does not constitute any advice that any of the suggestions are optimal for your situation or even legal to use in your juridiction. In accounting a person or business which has a separate legal existence (primarily responsibility for the debts of the business) is usually referred to as an entity. A single legal entity might however might have a number of separate business activities which might have an operational separation but no separate legal existence.
GnuCash has the flexibility to be able to setup treatmentof your finances either in one single book, two books for the business activities of yourself and your wife and another one for your and your wife's personal activities if that were suitable. The optimal strutcure will depend upon the taxation and business legislation you operate under and its record keeping and reporting requirements about which we cannot offer any advice. If you did use a single set of books, it would likely be a good idea to have separate income, expense, asset, liability and equity accounts for your personal activities and each of the business activities/entities. In GnuCash the top level accounts are of type Asset, Liability, Equity, Income and Expense and any separation of accounts between your activity/entities would have to take place under each of the top level account. This would allow you to structure separate reports for each activity for example. One limitation to keep in mind is that the business features of GnuCash, if you have need to use them are not designed to support multiple entities in the one set of book,s which might make business reporting difficult. If the books (files) were to be totally separate you would treat transfers of funds into the business accounts from your personal accounts as a decrease in your personal equity and an increase in your equity in the business activity with the reverse for transfers from the business account to your personal account with a transaction of the form Asset:CurrentAssets:Cheque Cr $xxxx Equity: Dr $xxxx in your personal book/file (notated appropriately in the description and memo fields and another separate transaction Asset:CurrentAssets:BusinessAccount Dr $xxxx Equity:Owners contributions Cr $xxxx in the separate book/file for the business. If you were using a single set of books (file) a transfer of funds might look like Asset:CurrentAssets:Cheque Cr $xxxx Asset:CurrentAssets:BusinessAccount Dr $xxxx Equity:Personal Dr $xxxx Equity:OwnersContributionstoBusiness Cr $xxxx which would be a single transaction with what are called 4 splits or entries in Gnucash to the four accounts. Hope this gives you some ideas about how GnuCash might be used to discuss with your accountant. David Cousens ----- David Cousens -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
