> On Oct 17, 2019 w42d290, at 4:59 PM, Geert Janssens > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Op woensdag 16 oktober 2019 21:37:45 CEST schreef Adrien Monteleone: >>> On Oct 16, 2019 w42d289, at 2:11 PM, James Thorpe >>> <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> Thanks for the responses. >>> >>> Stan: I had not considered creating separate AR accounts for each >>> customer. That may be a wise thing to do although it seems the business >>> features track the customer payments etc fine if all are in the same AR >>> account provided.... you use the Invoice/ Payment mechanism to create the >>> entries. >>> >>> However, I just tested doing that with a dummy set of accounts and while >>> you can set the opening balance in that way, because the opening balance >>> is not linked to the customer in the business features, it doesn't show >>> on the "Customer Report". To get it to show there may require some more >>> trickery of some sort. You can "assign as payment" but I don't know any >>> other way of doing it. >> I don’t know of any such wizardry either. The Business Features can’t 'see' >> manual transactions. As Opening Balances aren’t a payment, there’s no way >> to get them to recognize this. (what would you assign it to?) >> > You'd assign it to the Opening Balance account.
Indeed, I see in the Process Payment screen you can assign it to that account. Considering the below info, I too think this is the way to go. Regards, Adrien > >> Maybe (I haven’t tried) you could use Process Payment to make the entry >> (rather than make it manually and doing an ‘Assign’) and set the amount as >> negative, which would effectively create a debit to AR, and assign it to >> the customer. You might also be able to put "Balance Forward" or some such >> in the Memo field in the Process Payment dialog. But then when that >> customer starts making payments, I don’t know if you could ‘apply’ them >> properly to that Balance Forward or if they’d all just float un-linked >> forever. That might be worth a little trial though. >> > This is the way to go IMO. Create the opening balance as a refund (via > Process > Payment) for each customer with an opening balance. Future customer payments > can be "applied" to this opening balance "refund". > > As an aside you can apply payments and credit notes against either invoices > or > refunds as you see fit, so applying a payment against an earlier refund is > perfectly fine. > > Note as gnucash doesn't know anything about special opening balances for > customers it will present these payments as just that - payments. So there > will be a "Pre-Payment" note in the payment window for your opening balance > "payment" as well. For your own convenience I recommend indeed to add a Memo > to this opening balance "payment" as Adrien already suggests. > > Final note, if you have customers that had a positive balance (that is paid > you more than you invoiced them), you obviously have to apply the inverse > logic. For those customers you need to create a "payment" opening balance > instead of a "refund" opening balance. > >> I suspect however if you try to enter a negative payment it will flip to the >> ‘refund’ box and not work. >> > That's just a visual inconvenience, internally a refund and a negative > payment > are the same thing. > >> On that line of thought, you might be able to ‘abuse’ Credit Notes with >> reversed amounts posted to the Equity:Opening Balance account (if it will >> let you), you might then be able to assign future payments against the >> ’negative’ credit note. This wouldn’t be much different from entering an >> invoice though, so likely not worth the hassle. >> > These inherit the same limitation as invoices in that you can't transfer to > the opening balance. > > Regards, > > Geert _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
