David,
I don't really have a strong opinion on this subject right now, I've
also read Si's comment
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-93#action_12458933
and I'm doing some tests right now to see if I can figure out how it works.
I did these proposals because I got the impression that the billing
account implementation in svn could have some bugs caused by design
decisions different from the original design for billing account.
In fact the current order entry checkout process (in the backoffice
application) is broken (the billingAccountId is not stored in the order
etc...) if you select the billing account as payment method; but
probably, as suggested by Si, this is just caused by a series of misc
bugs (introduced by recent changes); I'll further investigate this (in
the meantime, maybe you could have a quick review to the
order_billingAccount_co.patch I've attached to OFBIZ-92, that will fix
the checkout error, in a quick-and-rather-dirty way).
Just to be sure to understand: if I want to associate (part of) the
amount of a payment in advance to a billing account I have to 'apply'
the amount to the billing account (using a PaymentApplication with empty
invoiceId); if I want to use (part of) that amount to pay an invoice
(associated to the billing account) I have to create a new payment
application (as usual) from the payment to the invoice (using a
PaymentApplication with invoiceId and billingAccountId set).
Is that correct?
Thanks,
Jacopo
David E Jones wrote:
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
