Jens, If you were to try and maintain enough separation of the affairs of your companies and trusts in one set of books, you would have to duplicate the transactions in any case. To keep a record of what is paid for from your personal account for each entity you would need to run a virtual bank account for each entity in any case as you have to record the transfer to the equity of that entity even though you may only have one real bank account e.g you purchase letterhead for LLC1 from your personal bank account for $100. You cannot simply record that as Debit Credit Asset:Personal:Bank 100 Expense:LLC1:Office:Expenses 100
Doing this you have no record of the transfer of money between the entities. True your accountant could sort it out and would do so by creating record like those given below. As someone else pointed out she/he will charge handsomely for doing so. To keep the separation of the entities you would have to have something like this even in a single book/file Debit Credit Asset:Personal:Bank 100 Asset:Personal:Investment:LLC1 100 Asset:LLC1:VirtualBank 100 Equity:LLC1:OwnerContributions 100 Asset:LLC1:VirtualBank 100 Expense:LLC1:OfficeSupplies 100 If you maintain separate files for your entities the first two entries would be in your personal.gnucash file/book and the other four entries would be in the LLC1.gnucash file/book and you would drop the entity. Effectively there would be no real duplication of effort. For money received by each entity the transactions would have to have a similar structure ( with debits and credits reversed and an Income account for each entity instead of an expense account). I don't know about Windows or Macs but on Linux Mint the icons in the toolbar showup with the first few letters of the filename so if you choose the filenames wisely it is fairly easy to bring up the set of books you want to make the entries in separate books while opening each file in a separate instance of gnucash. If you have enough RAM you can leave all the files open simultaneously andjust switch between them as required. In that single book/file for each matching split in a transaction you would have a huge list come up in the account selection field, not organised by entity, from which you have to select the appropriate destination account for the second split. The scope for error is large and the time involved in sorting out errors will be demanding. Hope this helps clarify why those of us with a bit of accounting experience and/or practice recommend using separate files for each entity. ----- 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.