Is there a way to combine 2 businesses?
This is more of an accounting procedure issue than a software problem. There are tax implications and many other factors that need to be considered.
The accounting treatment depends on:
- whether the businesses are legally separate,
- whether one business acquires the other,
- whether they are under common ownership,
- and whether a new entity is being created.
Once these operations or businesses become a single economic unit, the accounting records must reflect:
- unified assets,
- unified liabilities,
- unified equity,
- and unified operations.
I believe you should involve an accountant in the process.
@EnryLance there is no easy way to do it. One solution would be to have new kind of extension which will take business A, then business B, combine them and produce business C. But such an extension will need to be a bit more sophisticated so that you don’t end up with duplicate tax codes, inventory items or accounts within chart of accounts.
Anyway, right now, such an extension doesn’t exist but technically speaking it could exist.
@Lubos, I don’t think this is a good answer for him. You’ve made similar responses to many ideas on the forum, but some of them have been left unresolved for years. It becomes frustrating when people follow suggestions that create expectations and then nothing concrete happens for years to come.
If you are going to respond like this, it would be better to include clear timelines or at least realistic estimates of when things might actually be addressed. Otherwise it just leaves people in uncertainty and, frankly, it doesn’t feel very fair to keep things open-ended like that.
Realistically an extension to combine two businesses could be created within a few hours using AI. There is growing number of people able to create such extensions now.
The challenge right now is that there are only two developers (@Mabaega and @visioncoreteam) who are trusted to publish an extension within Manager. But I see others capable too. This is my focus now because it’s the quickest way to resolve most of the ideas that have been posted on this forum over the years.
@lubos, I understand the benefit of keeping Manager’s core lean and allowing extensions to handle country-specific or specialized functionality. In principle, that is a good direction.
However, I think @Patch raised the central concern and more important challenge: the issue is not only whether extensions are useful, but what the trust model is.
If third parties can create and maintain extensions, there needs to be a clear trust model around review, hosting, permissions, updates, and accountability.
Once an extension is visible or recommended inside Manager, users will naturally assume it has passed some level of review. That matters especially for accounting software, because the data may include invoices, tax records, bank transactions, customers, suppliers, payroll-related information, and years of business history.
Other ecosystems have already shown the risk. WordPress plugins, npm packages, browser extensions, and IDE marketplaces have all had cases involving vulnerable plugins, maintainer takeovers, compromised publishers, or malicious updates. This does not mean Manager has the same problem today, but it shows why extension systems need governance.
There is also a practical quality-control issue. I tried the Nigeria extension and the Setup button does not work in my installation. See screenshot.
That may be a simple bug, but it raises the question of how extensions are tested before listing, and how bugs, regressions, unsupported extensions, and security concerns are handled afterwards.
Also how does one uninstall an extension, what happens to the data and database config?
Extensions should also be scoped to individual businesses, not globally across the whole installation. A user may have Australian, Nigerian, American, and Pakistani businesses in the same Manager installation, each with different tax logic, reports, and compliance rules.
I also think extensions need proper management: developer details, purpose, permissions, data touched, version history, last update, support contact, enable/disable per business, uninstall, problem reporting, and an explanation of what happens to extension-created data if the extension is removed.
I say this because I genuinely like Manager. But the more Manager relies on extensions, the more important vetting, isolation, permissions, update control, and support responsibility become.
If third parties can create and maintain extensions, there needs to be a clear trust model around review, hosting, permissions, updates, and accountability.
Agreed. Example in case: I have been developing an extension for importing transactions that not only handles payments and receipts, but also handles inter account transfers (with a little bit of configuration), and even generates some journal entries that can be deduced from the download.
I think many would benefit from such an extension, and. I have been thinking about making it available to the community. But only in source form, even if that would limit the possible user group to the technologically savvy. I would not think of making it available to be run on a server, asking users to entrust me with their data.
There is of course confidentiality to consider, but also possible data corruption in the case of bugs in my code. Who would check my code before installing it? Testing alone would not be enough. And how thoroughly could that be done, where there are not even any coding standards (as far as I know) that I would have to adhere to? And who would be liable in case of problems?
And then there is the problem of maintenance. If you offer such a function as a company, you need to maintain it. What if I am no longer willing, or able, to do so? And what would be the process to install an update? Who would be the responsible party for that?
I regularly notice that @lubos replies to issues with new releases, reported by users, by releasing a patch in the next update. He does that quickly and that is commendable, but could he also take care of issues with extensions outside of his knowledge and control? That seems to be expecting too much.
Finally, but most importantly, Manager might be held accountable for damage as a result of an extension going haywire. I asked ChatGPT about it, and while not legal advice in a formal sense, it seems alarming enough. Bottom line:
In most developed legal systems, a service provider can be held liable if it fails to exercise the level of care that can reasonably be expected from a professional organization.
And you cannot just ask customers to accept the risk. Such so-called liability exclusion clauses in contracts are often not valid in these cases. This holds generally true, also in case the customer and the service provider are in different jurisdictions.
Therefore, I support your position. Frankly, I do not think Manager at the current time is able to responsibly manage such an enterprise.
I hope I am wrong, but it would take a lot to convince me otherwise.