I'm not so sure about this one Jacopo...
Is the only point to be able to associate a Payment to a
BillingAccount without a corresponding invoice? Right now that is
possible with the PaymentApplication entity, ie we've been using it
for a while this way where there is a Payment in advance on a
BillingAccount, leading to a positive balance on it.
This may not be the best way to do it... is that what you're saying
that structuring it differently would make the processing or figuring
out the status easier somehow?
-David
On Dec 12, 2006, at 7:19 AM, Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
One last detail I'd like to specify about the following point is:
> c)add the following constraint: a payment and an invoice
associated to
> two different billing accounts cannot be matched; the application
of a
> payment with null billingAccountId to an invoice associated to a
> billing account is ok
is that "if a payment has the billing account id set, then it can
only be applied to invoices associated to the same billing account"
Jacopo
Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
David,
after some more study about this I think that there are some
things that should still be fixed.
Right now the billingAccountId is stored in the OrderHeader, then
propagated to the Invoice header and finally (with my last patch)
to the PaymentApplications applied to the invoice.
However, in my opinion we can remove the billingAccountId field
from the PaymentApplication entity because it is superfluous. We
should instead add it to the Payment entity, in order to implement
the ability to accept payments and associate them to a billing
account (before the invoices are created, for example).
Right now, if we need to store a payment before the invoice is
created and we want to associate it to a billing account we do the
following:
1) we create a Payment
2) we create a PaymentApplication (for the same amount) and
associate it to the billing account
In my opinion this is not completely correct, because we are not
really applying a payment to something real like an invoice (we
just need to associate it to the billing account); in fact, for
example, the same payment could be used later to pay two different
invoives associated to the billing account and so the original
PaymentApplication entry would be wrong.
To summarize, here is what I propose:
a) remove the field PaymentApplication.billingAccountId
b) add the field Payment.billingAccountId
c) add the following constraint: a payment and an invoice
associated to two different billing accounts cannot be matched;
the application of a payment with null billingAccountId to an
invoice associated to a billing account is ok
d) in the balance of a billing account we should simply consider:
d1) all the open amount of the invoices associated to the billing
account (-)
d2) the unapplied amount of all the payments associated to the
billing account
Does it make sense?
Jacopo
