The Ownership module records who owns each company in your organization and for what period, then reports the consequences: how net income and equity divide among owners, what a parent’s effective stake is once you trace it through intermediate holding companies, and how much of a subsidiary’s income belongs to non-controlling interests.
Ownership records are reference data, not accounting records. Nothing here posts to the ledger. The reports read your existing balance sheet and apply ownership percentages to it, so an ownership record is safe to correct without touching the books.
The same separation sets the boundary of what these reports can do for you. Ownership percentages do not drive consolidation, and the NCI figure is a pro-rata split rather than an ASC 810 balance. Read what ownership reporting does not do before you rely on it for consolidated statements.
Before you start
Ownership is off by default. To have it enabled for your organization, contact your account manager; there is no self-serve setting that turns it on. Once it is enabled, Ownership appears in your navigation and the rest of this page applies.
Three other things need to be in place.
- Companies. The companies whose ownership you are recording must already exist. Elimination companies are rejected, since an elimination company has no equity of its own to divide.
- Permissions. Viewing the module needs
ownership:view. Adding and editing owners and stakes need ownership:create and ownership:edit, and archiving needs ownership:archive. If Ownership is enabled for your organization but you cannot open it, ask an administrator to grant you these.
- A balance sheet that reflects reality. All three reports pull equity and net income from the balance sheet as of the date you ask for. If the period is not closed, the reports show what the ledger holds right now.
You do not need a complete cap table before you start. Every screen shows how much of a company is allocated so far, so you can record owners as you confirm them and see at a glance what is still outstanding.
Add owners
An owner is whoever holds equity: a person, or another company. The Owners page is where you create them, and where you review everything one owner holds.
- Navigate to Accounting → Ownership → Owners and choose New Owner.
- Enter the owner’s name.
- Choose the owner type, Individual or Entity.
- For an entity owner that is one of your own companies, select that company. Individual owners have no company field.
- Save. The owner now exists but holds nothing; you give it a stake in the next section.
Each owner has a type, and the type decides what else the record carries:
- Individual: a person. An individual owner cannot be linked to a company, and a stake held by an individual is where an ownership chain ends.
- Entity: a company. When that company is one of yours, link the owner record to it. That link is what lets DualEntry trace ownership upward through a holding structure rather than stopping at the first level.
That link is the single most consequential field in the module. Without it, a parent company holding a subsidiary is just a name on a list, and Effective Ownership has no edge to follow. Each company can back at most one owner record, so a company already used as an owner appears greyed out with the name of the owner that claimed it.
An owner does not have to be a company you run. An outside investor, a founder, or a fund is recorded as an owner by name alone, and only the entity owners that correspond to your own companies carry the company link.
To load a cap table you already hold elsewhere, use Import rather than typing records one at a time. Owners and ownership records import separately through the standard bulk import flow, so import the owners first and the stakes second.
Deleting an owner archives every ownership record that owner held, together. Restoring the owner brings those records back, but only if they still fit: if the restored stakes would overlap another record or push a company past 100%, the restore is rejected rather than silently reopening an invalid cap table.
Record ownership stakes
A stake says an owner held a percentage of a company across a date range. Record stakes on the Ownership Setup page, which lists companies with the state of each one’s cap table.
- Navigate to Accounting → Ownership → Ownership Setup and open the company being owned.
- Add an ownership record.
- Select the owner. If the owner does not exist yet, create it here without leaving the form.
- Enter the ownership percentage, greater than 0 and at most 100, to two decimal places.
- Set the effective start date, and an effective end date if the stake has already ended. Leave the end date empty while the owner still holds the stake.
- Save. The stake now counts toward the company’s total on every date in its range.
To change a percentage rather than correct one, do not edit the existing record. End it and add a new one, so the history of who held what and when survives the change.
Two rules govern the timeline, and both are enforced when you save rather than discovered later in a report:
- No overlaps. The same owner cannot hold two stakes in the same company over overlapping dates. To change a percentage, end the existing record the day before the new one starts.
- No more than 100%. Ownership of a company cannot exceed 100% on any date. DualEntry checks the dates your change actually affects, including the start and end dates of other stakes that fall inside your range, so a change in the middle of a timeline cannot push a later date over 100% unnoticed.
The 100% check runs in one direction only. Going over is blocked at save; falling short is not, so you can record owners as you confirm them and leave a company partly allocated in the meantime. That is also why three equal partners at 33.33% each save without complaint: the total is 99.99%, and DualEntry does not force the last hundredth. Going the other way, a total is allowed to exceed 100% by up to 0.01 for the same rounding reason, but no further.
Individual records carry a status wherever they are listed: Scheduled before the start date, Active during the period, and Expired after the end date. Archived records show as Inactive and are excluded from every total and every report.
Check a company’s cap table
Ownership Setup lists your companies with two figures per row, both as of the date you are viewing: how many owners hold an effective stake, and what those stakes total. The total is a colored badge, which is how you scan a long list for problems.
What each color means:
- Green at exactly 100%. The cap table is complete for that date.
- Blue between 0% and 100%. Allocation is in progress. This is the normal state while you are still recording owners, not an error.
- Red above 100%. A data error. Correct a percentage or a date range.
- Grey at 0%. Nobody holds an effective stake on this date.
Grey is the one to look at twice, because 0% has several causes that read identically on screen. The company may simply not be set up yet. Its stakes may all start later, in which case the cap table takes effect on the start date and there is nothing to do. Or every stake may have ended with nothing replacing it, which usually means a disposal was recorded without its successor, or an end date was entered and the new stake never followed. That last case is the one worth chasing down, and moving the as-of date back a period tells you quickly which of the three you are looking at.
While you are entering a stake, the form shows how much of the company is still unallocated on that date, so you can record a partial cap table without doing the arithmetic yourself.
Expanding a company on Ownership Setup opens its own view of the same data, with an Ownership tab listing that company’s stakes and an Allocation tab showing the split across its owners without leaving the page. The Activity tab reports that activity history is not available; per-record change history is not something this module surfaces today, so treat the audit trail as the record of who changed what.
Allocate net income and equity across owners
The Ownership Allocation report divides a single company’s net income and equity among its direct owners as of a date. Use it to answer what each partner or shareholder earned in a period.
For each owner with an effective stake, the report shows the ownership percentage, that owner’s share of fiscal year-to-date net income, and that owner’s share of the balance sheet equity balance. Rows sort by percentage, largest first.
Every share is calculated independently and rounded to cents, then the rows are summed. This means the allocated shares can differ from the company total by a cent or two across many owners, which is the standard treatment and keeps each owner’s figure correct on its own terms. The caption below the table states the company’s own net income and equity balance, so you can see what was being divided.
When recorded ownership does not cover the whole company, the report says so above the table rather than leaving you to notice. Under 100%, it names the percentage covered and the percentage unassigned, and warns that the unassigned portion is not included in the totals. Over 100%, it tells you the shares below are overstated, which they are until you correct a percentage.
Allocation covers direct owners only. An owner two levels up a holding chain does not appear here; that is what Effective Ownership is for.
Trace effective ownership and split NCI
The Effective Ownership & NCI report answers what a parent really owns once ownership passes through intermediate companies, and how much of a subsidiary’s income belongs to everyone else.
Starting from the company you select, DualEntry follows ownership edges upward through entity owners linked to companies. At each level it multiplies the percentages: a parent holding 80% of a company that holds 60% of your subsidiary has an effective stake of 48%. The controlling chain follows the largest stake at each level, and the report shows each hop with its direct and cumulative effective percentage, so you can see where a stake was diluted.
From the effective percentage, the report splits fiscal year-to-date net income into the parent’s share and the non-controlling interest share. NCI percentage is the remainder to 100%, and the NCI share is the net income left after the parent’s share, so the two always sum to net income exactly.
This NCI figure is a pro-rata share of the company’s own result. It is not the ASC 810 non-controlling interest balance used in consolidated financial statements, which accounts for the NCI’s share of acquisition-date fair value and subsequent changes in equity. Use this report for investor reporting and internal analysis, and compute the ASC 810 balance separately for statements you issue.
Review one owner’s holdings
The Owner Portfolio report inverts the question: instead of one company’s owners, it shows one owner’s companies. For each holding it lists the company, the ownership percentage, and the owner’s share of that company’s equity, sorted by the largest position.
Alongside the holdings it reports the number of companies held and the simple average ownership percentage across them. The average is a plain mean of the percentages, not weighted by company size, so read it as a measure of how concentrated the positions are rather than as an economic figure.
When an owner holds companies reporting in different currencies, DualEntry does not sum the equity exposure. The per-company figures still display in their own currencies, but the total is withheld and the report marks the portfolio as mixed-currency, because adding amounts across currencies would produce a number that means nothing. To get a combined figure, translate the companies to a common reporting currency first; see multi-currency reporting.
Like Allocation, Portfolio covers direct holdings only.
All three reports read the same source, which is worth knowing when a number needs explaining.
Equity and net income come from the balance sheet for the selected company as of the date you choose, using your default book and its currency. Net income is the fiscal year-to-date figure from that balance sheet, not the figure for a single month or quarter, so an allocation dated mid-year reflects the year so far.
Ownership percentages come from the stakes effective on that date, where effective means the start date is on or before it and the end date is empty or on or after it. Archived records are excluded everywhere: they do not count toward 100% and do not appear in any report.
Because the reports read the ledger live, rerunning one after a correction reflects the change immediately. If an allocated figure looks wrong, check the balance sheet for the same company and date first; the reports apply percentages to whatever the ledger holds, so a surprising allocation is more often a ledger question than an ownership one.
Export ownership data
What you can take out of the module depends on where you are.
The Ownership Allocation and Effective Ownership & NCI reports export to PDF and Excel from the export control on the report. One export runs at a time, and the control stays disabled until the report has rows to render, so there is no empty file to clean up.
Owner Portfolio does not export yet. Its export control is present but inactive, and the tooltip says so.
Separately, an owner’s ownership records download as CSV from the owner’s own Ownership tab. That file carries the company, percentage, start and end dates, and the status each record shows on screen, with raw ISO dates and the decimal percentage so the file stays machine-readable.
What ownership reporting does not do
Three limits are worth settling with your team before you build a process on this module, because each one is a place where the reports stop short of what the name suggests.
- Ownership does not drive consolidation. Percentages recorded here do not feed consolidation or elimination entries. A subsidiary you own 51% of still rolls up at 100% in your consolidated financial statements. Reflecting a minority interest in issued statements still takes manual topside entries in the elimination entity.
- The NCI figure is pro-rata, not ASC 810. As above, it splits the company’s own result by effective percentage rather than computing a non-controlling interest balance under ASC 810.
- There is no income statement by owner. You get each owner’s share of net income and equity on the Allocation and Effective Ownership reports, but not a full income statement broken out by owner.
None of these block the reporting the module is built for, which is answering who owns what and what their share comes to. They do mean the ownership figures and your consolidated statements are produced by separate processes today, so a reviewer comparing the two should expect them to differ.
