On Sun, Oct 22, 2023 at 1:42 PM Adrien Monteleone < [email protected]> wrote:
> From the GnuCash website: > > "GnuCash is personal and small-business financial-accounting software..." > I will note that "small" in terms of revenue, assets, staff, or owners is arbitrary, so I'll focus on trying to extract the intended meaning behind "small business." Neither sole proprietorships, partnerships, nor disregarded entities have the ability to retain earnings. (Households don't really use the phrase "retained earnings" while doing their own bookkeeping either, they'd probably call it something like "discretionary spending money.") The only use case where retained earnings comes into play is when performing bookkeeping for a business that is taxed separately from its owners. This could be a single-owner LLC that has elected to be taxed as a corporation or a multinational public corporation that has elected to be taxed as a corporation. Jurisdictions outside the US may have dissimilar approaches to financial accounting, but I can't comment on them due to lack of familiarity. It seems to me the most straightforward way for businesses that can retain earnings to use GnuCash to track retained earnings and profit passed on to owners is to * close books (manually or using the built-in tool based on which method they prefer), and * use a "changes in equity" report that correctly disregards closing entries and/or journal entries that shouldn't be interpreted as investments or withdrawals of capital The answer to my original question is that the existing Equity Statement report doesn't achieve what I'm going after. I don't have much experience with reports, but I want to try my hand at creating one that does. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] 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.
