I'm new to GnuCash. I need an accounting package because I am now in the
position of having four different tax identification numbers (and thus
four different tax returns to prepare). Briefly, the situation is that
I'm recently widowed. My wife and I had a living trust, and on her death
the trust split into two parts: the Survivor's trust, which is money I
can use for any purpose, and the Marital trust, which is set aside to
guarantee that her share of the estate has a chance of getting to her
heirs. The Marital trust has its own tax ID. I've also purchased an
acrigultural property, on which I plan to build a non-farm business and
continue farming the remainder of the land. I've set up both the farm
and the business as separate sole proprietorship LLCs, each with its own
tax ID.
So I have at least 5 pots of money: the two trusts, the two businesses
and my personal funds (cash, bank accounts, and IRAs). Each has its own
liabilities, assets, income, expenses, and equity. I've rejected the
"simple" solution of having 5 different GnuCash files because it's all
my money and I know I'm going to be doing a lot of moving money back and
forth between the different pots. For instance, it makes no sense to
have separate checking accounts or credit cards for the businesses at
this stage, so all business expenses will be paid with personal or trust
money. And the net income from the businesses and the trusts is personal
income, so goes back into my bank account.
If I set things up with the traditional 5 top-level accounts, I have to
create 5 nearly identical sub-accounts under each in order to divide
things up. It might be better to make one top-level "account" for each
entity, and set up liabilities, assets, income, expenses, and equity as
sub-accounts of each. But you can't do that, because the top-level
"accounts" are not really accounts in the sense of having an account
type. If I assign them an account type, which I am required to do, I'm
restricted in the types of subaccounts I can put under them. There is no
account type that allows all other account types among its subaccounts.
So it seems I can only go with the first plan: set up the traditional 5
top-level accounts (liabilities, assets, income, expenses, and equity)
and divide each into a subaccount for each entity. GnuCash seems to have
no problem with using the same name for a subaccount in two different
branches of the account tree, which is helpful. So this will be
time-consuming to set up (can't use the Druid, and there does not seem
to be a way to copy and paste account subtrees) but it should work. I
have not yet investigated whether I can get individual entity reports by
selecting, say, all accounts with the second level having the same name,
but I presume I can eventually make that work.
My questions:
1. Has anyone else faced this situation?
2. What solutions did they find?
3. How did their solution work?
4. Is my approach sensible?
5. Is it likely to work?
And a final observation. It would be nice if the documentation spelled
out somewhere the purpose and uses of the "Account Code". I don't
remember any explicit references to it in the Tutorial, and there is no
description of its use in the Help pages. All I can find is some oblique
references in the Wiki and related documents that it can be used to
create a sort order for siblings within the account hierarchy, and that
the order is determined by treating the code as a base-36 number with
digits "0-9A-Z". From this I can infer that the account code must be
case-insensitive and that punctuation marks are either illegal, ignored,
or cause weird effects. It would be nice if this were explicitly
documented. And if there are any other uses of the Account Code besides
sorting, those should be explained somewhere as well. If it is only used
for sorting purposes, perhaps it should be renamed to suggest that use.
Otherwise it is a puzzle for someone trying to set up an account for the
first time.
-- Jens
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