Most wealth at scale is not held in a single legal entity. A typical structure has an operating company, a holding company that owns equity and property, a personal account for daily life, and possibly a trust or SPV layered for tax or succession reasons.
Spreadsheets and consumer accounting apps treat each of these as separate, unrelated worlds. Aethelgard treats them as what they are: distinct entities that need to be reported on individually and rolled up into a single, consistent group view.
How Aethelgard structures entities
Each entity in Aethelgard — company, trust, holding vehicle, or individual — is a first-class object with its own chart of accounts, its own books, and its own reports. Entities can be grouped under a parent for consolidation.
When you create an entity, you classify it as Corporate, Trust, or Individual. This is not cosmetic. The class drives the equity vocabulary Aethelgard uses (share capital and retained earnings for a company, principal and undistributed income for a trust, owner’s capital for an individual) and the close-period orchestrator that runs accruals, depreciation, and FX revaluation in the right order for that class.
Inter-company transactions
The hardest part of multi-entity accounting is handling money that moves within the group — a holding company lending to an operating company, or paying an inter-company management fee. If you simply add the entities together, the same money appears on both sides of the consolidated Balance Sheet.
Aethelgard solves this with an is_intercompany flag on accounts:
- Mark the loan-receivable account in HoldCo and the matching loan-payable account in OpCo as inter-company.
- Aethelgard’s consolidation engine pairs them at run-time and posts an explicit elimination journal so the consolidated view shows the net group position.
- The elimination is auditable: every elimination journal is captured, so you can produce a textbook eliminate-on-consolidate trail for an auditor.
Single-entity vs consolidated reports
The reporting engine respects your structure both ways.
- Pick a single entity from the entity selector and you get a clean, standalone P&L and Balance Sheet for that company alone.
- Pick the parent group and you get a consolidated set, with inter-company eliminations applied automatically, currencies translated where needed, and equity-method investments treated correctly.
This is what makes it possible to answer two questions with the same data: how is OpCo doing? and how is the family doing in total?
Practical advice
- Use a consistent chart of accounts across entities. If “Legal Fees” is the same account code in OpCo and HoldCo, the consolidated view is materially cleaner.
- Separate funds in fact, not just on paper. Pay personal expenses from the personal entity, not from a corporate card with a “directors’ loan” plug at year-end. The audit trail is what protects the corporate veil if it is ever tested.
- Reconcile inter-company balances every period. If OpCo records a £50,000 liability to HoldCo, HoldCo must record the matching £50,000 receivable. Aethelgard’s period-close orchestrator surfaces mismatches; fix them in the period they appear, not at year-end.
Setting up
Create your entities from the Entities section in the sidebar. Set the entity class on each. Where you intend to consolidate, group entities under a parent. Once accounts are flagged inter-company on both sides of any internal balance, consolidation runs automatically when you select the parent in the reporting view.