How to manage multiple businesses with one bank account without classes

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Anonymous 0b94e48fe7
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Well, honestly this one is hard for Cheqbook to do, but if you can change how you work we can save you a lot of time.

Cheqbook was designed to automatically categorize everything.  This led to tough choices about features vs auto-categorization, and because it saved the most time auto-categorization almost always won our debates. 

You may be familiar with other accounting software that provides the opportunity to sub-categorize expenses into classes.  Classes are most often divisions of the same business or separate small businesses using the same account.  For example, a person who owned a number of rental properties might only have one bank account.  When they had a repair expense, they would first categorize it to repairs, then pick the class they'd established that represented that property address.  

Seems great, but there's no realistic way for Cheqbook to know which property that repair expense was for, so if Cheqbook had classes the revolutionary automatic categorization would be pointless.  Classes work in an accounting system where you expect to have to enter every transaction manually, but not in one which categorizes for you.  

So, how do you fix this?  Well, if you can change how you work just a little, then Cheqbook can still auto-categorize everything for you.  Here's how using the multiple property example:

  • Set up a separate bank account with a debit card (or similarly with a credit card) for each property
  • Open a Cheqbook company for each property 
  • Link each bank account to the appropriate Cheqbook company.
Now when you spend money on repairs by using the debit card or checks for that property Cheqbook will be able to automatically categorize those transactions for you!
Keep in mind a few things here: the property owner in the example is probably keeping one bank account because for their the old manual system that saved the most time: one less account to reconcile, one checkbook to carry around, etc. 
Now that dynamic has changed: so strongly consider giving Cheqbook the best chance to do you work for you.  We've even designed our pricing to encourage multiple companies. 
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4 Comments

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  • 0
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    Eze Ogueri

    Seriously, all Checqbook has to do to improve this is to add a field in the transaction register for Classes or Tags and also provide a report where you can run the profit and loss or expenses by classes. Classes can also be used as projects. I am an accountant and I cant refer my clients who require project or class accounting to cheqbook. If you want to compete with Quickbooks you need to have this feature. It is financially wasteful to ask a client to open up another bank account to track a project or class .

  • 0
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    Doug Levin

    Eze, 

    Well, that would prevent auto-categorization.  You'd have to manually visit each category to tell it which property to apply the expense to.

  • 0
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    Eze Ogueri

    Doug, thank you for your response. Could you please take a look at Moneyspire or Moneywiz . These software do auto categorize also. However the auto categorize can still apply to the natural general ledger account. The field for the class or project is a drop down field in which the user manually selects the project or class. When the Income statement is generated the information in its most basic format will only show the income statement by the natural general ledger account . However some programs like the two mentioned above will be able to run P & L reports by projects if so designed and desired. To make it easier for the programmer and to minimize redesign costs. The project field can be made to appear in the transaction detail reports when the user downloads to excel or csv. The user can now run a pivot table to show his profit and loss by project or class. This make it more flexible for the user. Trust me. If you can add this feature it will pay off in the long run as subscription rates will go up. The software is a well designed software . This is the only short coming I can see ... just from my own personal observation. Now as you mentioned earlier one could also use the memo field in such a way as "Project:Memo" and then do a text to column to split it in excel. I have considered this approach at times.This works also , its just that it would be tremendous goodwill on the part of the company to save the user additional input and the cost of opening up another  bank account. Another advantage of incorporating projects, classes or tags is that it save the user from having to create so many duplicate natural accounts thus making the chart of accounts very redundant and large to manage. Users can use the same account for different projects. Please give this some thought. It will go a long way in making this program a very sophisticated asset to your company. 

    Edited by Eze Ogueri
  • 0
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    Doug Levin

    Eze,

    Thanks for your response.  We are not in a mode right now where we can focus on such large scale potential improvements to the software.  We've instead been working on refining all the little things to make a user's overall experience smoother.  

    I do really appreciate this suggestion.  If the situation changes I will take a look at how those two companies have addressed the issue of classes and if there's something useful there (that isn't protected IP) we would be happy to consider it.

    Mahalo!

    Doug

     

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