Tracking Equity among Partners

Rather than having a single account for Partner's Draw and Partner's Contributions, you could set up individual accounts for each partner. For example, instead of having

37000 Partners Contributions

set up

37001 Partners Contrib--Smith01

37002 Partners Contrib--Harris01

and so on.

Do the same for Partner's Draw. For financial statements, you could create a total for these subaccounts, displaying the Total Partners Contributions and Total Partners Equity. How do I design a financial statement?

Department Masking

Sage 50 offers a powerful feature called department masking, which you could use to track equity per partner. The benefit of this method over the subaccount method is that you could run balance sheets for individual partners, showing only their equity.

To use department masking, set up account numbers using part of the account ID as an identifier for the "department" (in this case, department equals partner). For example,

39001 Partner's Draw

where the last two digits represent a code identifying the partner.

In the Financial Statement Design window, you can set a department mask for the column description for Balance, Activity, and Year-to-Date Activity. You would set the mask there as ***01 to show only totals for the partner designated as 01. You could save this balance sheet format and modify and save other balance sheets for other partners.

If you are using Sage 50 Premium Accounting or higher, you can use Account Segments, which make masking unnecessary. You can simply select a segment from the drop-down and Sage 50 will automatically filter on theat segment.