Setting up general ledger/tax reporting for a Real Estate Rental LLC in GnuCash
No, GnuCash doesn't specifically provide a partner cash basis report/function. However, GnuCash reports are fairly easy to write. If the data was readily available in your accounts it shouldn't be too hard to create a cash basis report. The account setup is so flexible, you might actually be able to create accounts for each partner, and, using standard dual-entry accounting, always debit and credit these accounts so the actual cash basis of each partner is shown and updated with every transaction. I used GnuCash for many years to manage my personal finances and those of my business (sole proprietorship). It really shines for data integrity (I never lost data), customer management (decent UI for managing multiple clients and business partners) and customer invoice generation (they look pretty). I found the user interface ugly and cumbersome. GnuCash doesn't integrate cleanly with banks in the US. It's possible to import data, but the process is very clunky and error-prone. Apparently you can make bank transactions right from GnuCash if you live in Europe. Another very important limitation of GnuCash to be aware of: only one user at a time. Period. If this is important to you, don't use GnuCash. To really use GnuCash effectively, you probably have to be an actual accountant. I studied dual-entry accounting a bit while using GnuCash. Dual-entry accounting in GnuCash is a pain in the butt. Accurately recording certain types of transactions (like stock buys/sells) requires fiddling with complicated split transactions. I agree with Mariette: hire a pro. "You will need to set up accounts in your chart of accounts for each of the partners. These are equity accounts where you can track your contributions, share of the profits and losses, and distributions. You're going to have to go back into the beginning years to get this right. I'm not sure what you mean by a ""Built-in function"". All the accounting software I'm familiar with requires data entry of some kind. You need to post your contributions and distributions to the correct accounts, and close properly at year end. You were indeed legally considered a partnership as soon as you started a for-profit business venture together. It's a bug in the legal system that a written partnership agreement is not necessarily required - you can form a partnership unknowingly. (BTW, a partnership actually is pretty far off from a sole proprietorship, legally and taxwise - the change from one person to two is major. It's the change from two to three or four or more that's incremental ;) I know you said you didn't want to consult a professional, but I have to say that I think it's worth the money to get your books set up by someone who has experience and can show you how to do it. And get a separate bank account for the partnership, if you haven't done so already. And check with your state to see if there are any requirements regarding partnerships. Hope this helps, Mariette IRS Circular 230 Notice: Please note that any tax advice contained in this communication is not intended to be used, and cannot be used, by anyone to avoid penalties that may be imposed under federal tax law."
If you're audited routinely you probably have an accountant to get this straight. It's not something that I would be too worried about as it is purely journal-entry issue, there's no problem with the actual money. Mistakes happen. I'd suggest converting the currency, taking loss/gain on the conversion as a capital loss/gain, and credit the correct currency to the correct account. If GnuCash causes problems - just record it in the EUR equivalent, putting in notes the actual SGD value. Note that I'm not an accountant and this is not a professional advice. You report each position separately. You do this on form 8949. 7 positions is nothing, it will take you 5 minutes. There's a tip on form 8949 that says this, though: For Part I (short term transactions):  Note. You may aggregate all short-term transactions reported on   Form(s) 1099-B showing basis was reported to the IRS and for which no   adjustments or codes are required. Enter the total directly on   Schedule D, line 1a; you are not required to report these transactions   on Form 8949 (see instructions). For Part II (long term transactions): Note. You may aggregate all long-term transactions reported on Form(s)   1099-B showing basis was reported to the IRS and for which no   adjustments or codes are required. Enter the total directly on   Schedule D, line 8a; you are not required to report these transactions   on Form 8949 (see instructions). If the 1099B in your case shows basis for each transaction as reported to the IRS - you're in luck, and don't have to type them all in separately. "I think the ""right"" way to approach this is for your personal books and your business's books to be completely separate. You would need to really think of them as separate things, such that rather than being disappointed that there's no ""cross transactions"" between files, you think of it as ""In my personal account I invested in a new business like any other investment"" with a transfer from your personal account to a Stock or other investment account in your company, and ""This business received some additional capital"" which one handles with a transfer (probably from Equity) to its checking account or the like. Yes, you don't get the built-in checks that you entered the same dollar amount in each, but (1) you need to reconcile your books against reality anyway occasionally, so errors should get caught, and (2) the transactions really are separate things from each entity's perspective. The main way to ""hack it"" would be to have separate top-level placeholder accounts for the business's Equity, Income, Expenses, and Assets/Liabilities. That is, your top-level accounts would be ""Personal Equity"", ""Business Equity"", ""Personal Income"", ""Business Income"", and so on. You can combine Assets and Liabilities within a single top-level account if you want, which may help you with that ""outlook of my business value"" you're looking for. (In fact, in my personal books, I have in the ""Current Assets"" account both normal things like my Checking account, but also my credit cards, because once I spend the money on my credit card I want to think of the money as being gone, since it is. Obviously this isn't ""standard accounting"" in any way, but it works well for what I use it for.) You could also just have within each ""normal"" top-level placeholder account, a placeholder account for both ""Personal"" and ""My Business"", to at least have a consistent structure. Depending on how your business is getting taxed in your jurisdiction, this may even be closer to how your taxing authorities treat things (if, for instance, the business income all goes on your personal tax return, but on a separate form). Regardless of how you set up the accounts, you can then create reports and filter them to include just that set of business accounts. I can see how just looking at the account list and transaction registers can be useful for many things, but the reporting does let you look at everything you need and handles much better when you want to look through a filter to just part of your financial picture. Once you set up the reporting (and you can report on lists of account balances, as well as transaction lists, and lots of other things), you can save them as Custom Reports, and then open them up whenever you want. You can even just leave a report tab (or several) open, and switch to it (refreshing it if needed) just like you might switch to the main Account List tab. I suspect once you got it set up and tried it for a while you'd find it quite satisfactory." I generally concur with your sentiments. mint.com has 'hack me' written all over it.  I know of two major open source tools for accounting: GNUCash and LedgerSMB. I use GNUCash, which comes close to meeting your needs: The 2.4 series introduced SQL DB support; mysql, postgres and sqlite are all supported. I migrated to sqlite to see how the schema looked and ran, the conclusion was that it runs fine but writing direct sql queries is probably beyond me. I may move it to postgres in the future, just so I can write some decent reports. Note that while it uses HTML for reporting, there is no no web frontend. It still requires a client, and is not multi-user safe. But it's probably about the closest to what you what that still falls under the heading of 'personal finance'. A fork of SQL Ledger, this is postgreSQL only but does have a web frontend. All the open source finance webapps I've found are designed for small to medium busineses. I believe it should meet your needs, though I've never used it. It might be overkill and difficult to use for your limited purposes though. I know one or two people in the regional LUG use LedgerSMB, but I really don't need invoicing and paystubs. "Here's a very basic MySQL query I put together that does what I want for  income/expense report. Basically it reports the same info as the canned income/expense report, but limits it those income/expenses associated with a particular account (rental property, in my case).  My main complaint is the output ""report"" is pretty ugly. And modifying for a different rental property requires changing the code (I could pass parameters etc). Again, the main ""issue"" in my mind with GnuCash income/expense report is that there is no filter for which account (rental property) you want income/expenses for, unless you set up account tree so that each rental property has its own defined incomes and expenses (i.e. PropertyA:Expense:Utility:electric).  Hopefully someone will point me to a more elegant solution that uses the report generator built into GnuCash. THanks! SELECT a2.account_type , a4.name, a3.name, a2.name, SUM(ROUND(IF(a2.account_type='EXPENSE',-  s2.value_num,ABS(s2.value_num))/s2.value_denom,2)) AS amt FROM    (     SELECT  s1.tx_guid     FROM    gnucash.accounts AS a1         INNER JOIN gnucash.splits AS s1 ON s1.account_guid = a1.guid     WHERE   a1.name='Property A'         ) AS X     INNER JOIN gnucash.splits s2 ON x.tx_guid = s2.tx_guid     INNER JOIN gnucash.accounts a2 ON a2.guid=s2.account_guid     INNER JOIN gnucash.transactions t ON t.guid=s2.tx_guid     LEFT JOIN gnucash.accounts a3 ON a3.guid = a2.parent_guid     LEFT JOIN gnucash.accounts a4 ON a4.guid = a3.parent_guid WHERE   a2.name <> 'Property A' # get all the accounts associated with tx in Property A account (but not the actual Property A Bank duplicate entries.         AND t.post_date BETWEEN CAST('2016-01-01' AS DATE) AND CAST('2016-12-31' AS DATE) GROUP BY a2.account_type ,a4.name, a3.name, a2.name  WITH ROLLUP ; And here's the output. Hopefully someone has a better suggested approach!" "As cryptocurrencies are rather new compared to most assets, there hasn't been a lot of specific guidance for a lot of situation, but in 2014 the IRS announced that it published guidance in Notice 2014-21. I'm not aware of further guidance that has been published beyond that, though it wouldn't surprise me if treatments changed over time. In that notice, the answer to the first question describes the general treatment: For federal tax purposes, virtual currency is treated as property. General tax principles applicable to property transactions apply to transactions using virtual currency. Your specific questions (about what constitutes a ""business"", and when you're considered to be ""selling"" the cryptoproperty) are likely to be considered on a case by case basis by the IRS. As the amounts involved here are so small (relatively speaking), my recommendation would be to read through what the IRS has published carefully, make reasonable assumptions about what scenarios that are described are closest to what you're doing, and document doing so clearly as part of your tax preparations. And when in doubt, erring on the side of whichever option incurs more tax is unlikely to be objected to by them. Of course, I'm not a lawyer or tax advisor, I'm a stranger on the Internet, so for ""real"" advice you should contact somebody qualified. I doubt you'd be faulted too much for not doing so given the amounts involved. You could also attempt contacting a local IRS office or calling them with your specific questions, and they may be able to provide more specific guidance tailored to you, though doing so may not save you from an auditor deciding something differently if they were to examine your return later. There are also phone numbers to contact specific people listed at the end of Notice 2014-21; you could try calling them as well." As DJClayworth said, be very careful with this one!   The property is a residence, not a business location.  Given that, it is almost a certainty that the IRS is not going to let you claim 100% of the expenses for the home as a business expense, even if nobody's actually living there.   You may get away with doing this for a period of time and not run into zoning or other issues such as those DJ mentioned, but it's like begging for trouble.  You run the very real risk of being audited if you try to do what you're proposing, and rest assured, whatever you saved in taxes will disappear like smoke in the wind under an audit. That being said, there's no reason you can't call a tax service and ask a simple question, because in answering it they're going to hope to gain your business.  It'd be well worth the phone call before you land yourself in any hot water with the IRS.  I can tell you that I'd rather have a double root canal with no anesthetic than go through an audit, even when I didn't do anything wrong! (grin) Good luck! So there are a lot of people that get into trouble in your type of self employment situation.  This is what I do, and I use google drive so there are no cost for tools.  However, having an accounting system is better. Getting in trouble with the IRS really sucks bad. Gnucash uses aqbanking, so I'd suggest looking at aqbanking to see if it will do what you want. It seems to be actively developed (as of 26.2.2011), but the main page is in German and my German is a bit rusty... You might also try asking on the gnucash-users list. "It comes down to the resolution you want to have on your personal finances.  A package like GNUCash allows you to easily answer questions like ""Exactly how much do I spend on interest per month/year/decade.""  Same with pretty much any other expense, liability or asset you have whether it be taxes, utilities, your home equity or your net worth.  The other tools you mention are nice, and certainly convenient, but they tend to lump things together in broad strokes and omit many categories altogether (taxes).  Ultimately by having such a fine grained accounting tool, you can target small or large things to better budget your money.   Another thing a package like GNUCash provides is a single, private place to consolidate all of your finances.  This is nice for things like net worth and asset accounts that you might not want to give a company access to. Finally, GNUcash in particular helps normal people think like accountants.  Rather than lump everything into 'income' and 'expenses', once you start using GNUCash you'll start thinking in terms of equity, liabilities, net-worth and assets in addition to income and expenses.  This gives me a much more accurate view of my finances and helps me better target areas for improvement.  In short, it helps me to see the broader picture which helps me to keep my eye on the prize - which of course is to not have to worry about money at all." "Gnucash is much more designed for accounting than for budgeting. While it does have some simple budgeting features, they're largely based around tracking how much has been spent in the Expense categories/accounts, and seeing how close one is to a limit that's been set. Because the point of Gnucash is accounting, there's not a way to track an expense in two expense categories simultaneously. (You can split a transaction across multiple categories, to have a grocery store purchase of $150 be split across $100 Food and $50 Phone Minutes or whatever. But not have a $150 purchase be tracked as $150 Food and $150 Household expenses, because that's not how double-entry accounting works.) The closest way to do what I think you're looking for is to take advantage of the hierarchical account structure, and repeat subcategories as needed. For example: This would allow you to see Household expenses vs. Vacation expenses, and still see what it got spent on. Reporting on all ""Food"" purchases, if you want to do so, is slightly more tricky as you'd need to select all those ""Food"" categories separately in your report, but it's possible. You speak about wanting to ""track"" expenses multiple ways, so I think that this would allow you to record data sufficient to ""track"" it. But the point of tracking any data is to be able to report on it in some fashion, so if you have more specific reporting requirements, you might want to ask about that as well." I believe it's not only legal, but correct and required. A 1099 is how a business reports payments to others, and they're required by the IRS to send them for payments of $600 or more (for miscalleneous payments like this). The payment is an expense to the landlord and income to you, and the 1099 is how that's documented (although note that if they don't send you a 1099, it's still income to you and you still need to report it as such). It's similar to getting a 1099-INT for interest payments or a 1099-DIV for dividend payments. You'll get a 1099-MISC for a miscellaneous payment. If you were an employee they'd send you a W-2, not a 1099. You will need Premier, since it is the first one to include Schedule E. Deluxe used to support Schedule E for investments, but not anymore. Most taxpayers know Schedule E as the schedule used for rentals, but you're going to need it to report your S-Corp income. If you need to shop coins, you could do your personal improvement, however, this may be tricky because of even easy documentation errors fee extra. For many little employer proprietors, the high-quality picks the use of a business enterprise company, which is a fee-powerful preference to make sure your documentation is accurate and filed right away with conditions. If you're concerned in Delaware LLC with as little quotes as viable, begin with the aid of considering conditions wherein you'll include. You do no longer require work within the state you select, however it may be more reasonable for pick out your home circumstance. There isn't one. I haven't been very happy with anything I've tried, commercial or open source. I've used Quicken for a while and been fairly happy with the user experience, but I hate the idea of their sunset policy (forced upgrades) and using proprietary format for the data files. Note that I wouldn't mind using proprietary and/or commercial software if it used a format that allowed me to easily migrate to another application. And no, QIF/OFX/CSV doesn't count. What I've found works well for me is to use Mint.com for pulling transactions from my accounts and categorizing them. I then export the transaction history as a CSV file and convert it to QIF/OFX using csv2ofx, and then import the resulting file into GNUCash. The hardest part is using categories (Mint.com) and accounts (GnuCash) properly. Not perfect by any means, but certainly better than manually exporting transactions from each account.