Having 2 Chart of accounts for 1 company
VLS_106
Member Posts: 1
Hello,
I am new here and to Wave, I am in the process of setting up our Chart of Accounts but need to track 2 separate entities.
Here is the background, I am managing 2 Furnished Corporate rental suites, each suite is owned by a separate entity which I will need to have a separate PNL and Balance Sheet for. What would be the best way to manage this?
Thank you and sorry for the newbie type question.
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Hey @VLS_106 . Super excited to welcome you to both Wave and the Community
! Also, never be sorry for asking a question here, that's what the Community is for!
To start off, Wave does not currently offer project or property-based accounting. This means that you have two options when accounting for this.
1. You can house everything within the same business, which will allow you to view all of your Reporting together.
2. You can create a different business per rental property, allowing you to differentiate between your Reporting based on business. Subsequently, you won't be able to get a larger picture from Wave as to what your total balances are.
I'd advise on #2 as you can always add up your numbers and figures to get the bigger picture, whereas breaking them down individually can be much more difficult.
Sub accounts are really needed in wave to facilitate the ability to do this as it's not limited to project or property based accounting, it affects basics such as Expenses where everyone has an incidental then other item tipes (rent, telco etc) which is not project or property based accounting but suddenly would cover those as well.
Appreciate the additional feedback that you've provided us here ^ @jam -- This could be something that we implement in the future, but as of right now, there isn't any word of it being on a roadmap currently.
VLS 106
For 2 entities just double up the income and expense accounts by naming one Suite1 and the other, Suite2. You are not going to have that many doubled up accounts.
Most expenses will be for the 'business' so for reporting purposes you will just use half for each suite.
Pretty much every report you're going to use will require Excel to prepare and reconcile anyways. Don't sweat the small stuff.
I agree with the original poster (@VLS_106) here - this is a really really important feature. I just signed up for an account but the lack of this feature makes it very difficult to use for our use-cases.
Here's the problem:
There is no way to run any kind of reporting for any one of the individual properties. Creating a separate business doesn't work because the bank account can (as far as I can tell) only be associated to a single business. Moreover, even if it could be duplicated somehow there would be all these extra transactions that would have to continually be disregarded.
This seems to have an additional nuance because of how categorization is automated in Wave. In my case, I'd never want an account to be categorized without first selecting one of those properties to associate it to. In other words: EVERY accepted transaction MUST be associated to a property and this would need to be adjusted for the rules. There's almost always something in the memo line that would indicate, at least for the majority of the transactions, which property it should be associated to - and thus a great candidate for automating that tagging.
Its a really critical feature, at least for folks like the original poster and I who are trying to account for multiple properties. Opening up a checking account for each property within a self-contained business would be a very taxing way to contend with this.
Regards,
Greg Saylor
Hi Greg, @devnul! Thanks for reaching out! Eight different properties is a lot to keep track of! You can use either of the methods described in the thread above, but there will be a lot of extra work in doing this. As @AlexL mentioned, Wave has not been built out for property-based accounting, which means workarounds do have to be used. To get the correct transactions into your Wave account, you could download your statements from your bank as CSV files and then split the transactions for the 8 businesses into separate files to upload into each business. This is time consuming work, so I do see your need for a function to be built out!
Property management used to be simple to track with Wave, but the changes have made this very difficult. I used to create one business with the name of my property management company and then I created a new business for each rental property I owned, naming each "business" the address of the property. Then I would download my bank statement in the name of my property management company and merge receipts with each deposit and expense in that business acount. After everything was merged, I would transfer the transaction to the property (listed as a separate business in Wave) and it worked out perfectly. Now we do not have the ability to move transactions after the receipt has been finalized. Is there anyway you can bring that back? I loved that feature.
I am also in the process of setting up accounts with Wave for rental properties and was trying to figure out how to separate expenses per unit. Without this feature I'm going to have to keep looking for a software that can accommodate assigning expenses to a specific property. All the work arounds seem more complicated than building an excel spreadsheet.
Hi @Kalamaazoo , this feature was removed due to the impact it had on accounting that users were unaware of, but we'll be working on returning it to the software in the future when we can offer it with further functionality.
@ccrs As Wave doesn't support property management, there's no way to split expenses per unit at the moment. The workarounds listed above would be the only way to handle this in Wave.