> On Sep 8, 2024, at 8:01 AM, Michael or Penny Novack via gnucash-user > <gnucash-user@gnucash.org> wrote: > > On 9/7/2024 5:39 PM, David Cousens wrote: >> Brook >> >> The closest you can get with GnuCash is to have separate subaccounts >> for each entity under each of the top level accounts. >> > Wrong place to start (with a problem like this) > > First need to answer some questions at the "business" level.
All good questions. Let me circle back to the beginning to provide motivation. I have two entities that are closely coupled in the sense that there are a number of transactions that involved accounts in both, e.g., transfers of funds from one to the other. My original question was in regards to whether it is safe to have two distinct books open simultaneously, so that it would be easy to verify that a transaction in one book had the same information/values/etc. as the corresponding transaction in the other book. The direct answer to that question was that it is indeed safe but that there are non-technical issues to manage such as being sure that transactions are being entered into the correct book. The same discussion, however, also included the suggestion that new top-level accounts be created in a single book so that the two entities could be tracked together. I interpreted this to mean to create a top-level account for entity A and another for B; beneath each would be A:assets and B:assets, and so forth. It was mentioned that reports could easily be based upon a selection of the appropriate top-level account (and children). In other words selecting the top-level account A (and children) when creating a P/L report would be equivalent to selecting all accounts (and children) in a book devoted entirely to entity A. This seems like a logically valid solution to the problem of having tightly coupled entities in which a reasonable fraction of transactions are between the entities, as all parts of those transactions can be seen in a single entry rather than by inspecting two different books. While one can create new top-level accounts in GC, the type of subaccount is limited by the type of the top-level account. It is therefore impossible to create the accounts A:assets and A:equity, because the types of those are not compatible with a single parental type. Currently, the only option is to create the accounts A-assets, A-equity, B-assets, B-equity, etc. An alternative might be Assets:A, Assets:B, Equity:A, Equity:B, but that has the same drawbacks. These have the distinct disadvantage that the two entities are not well separated in the account hierarchy and therefore perhaps is more error prone. It seems that it would be useful to allow a new type of top-level account, which can have any type of subaccount. In that case, it would be possible to manage tightly coupled entities in what appears to me and to the earlier discussion to be the most straightforward way. I hope that clarifies the situation. Cheers, Brook _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
