invoice, cost of goods sold, process payment question

[John Griessen]

Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> what exactly are you trying to do here? Do you have expense accounts 
> created for COGS? 
Yes, I have an account Expenses:COGS.   It already exists.

When editing an invoice, the invoice entries column "Income Account" will not 
accept typing in Expenses:COGS, it just disappears after you try.

are you trying to tie each invoice to the COGS
> associated with it? 
Not necessary...would be nice.

or are you accruing an inventory asset for COGS
Yes, when I take half a sheet of plastic from inventory, I want to
move the inventory-valued amount, (the cost),
to expense, COGS, and thus have inventory decrease.  I was thinking
this could happen when editing an invoice, but I'm not sure this is possible.

and
> trying to debit that asset with each sale?
I was thinking of crediting the asset:inventory, (decreasing it) at the time of 
building assemblies from it, so I could call that WIP, work in process, and then 
be able to adjust for any loss or scrap at that stage.

Maybe I should only use account COGS when the thing sold is unmodified, or 
modified very little, such as in cutting piece off a length of some material,
and then COGS would be updated when a payment is processsed?  Ultimately, I want 
a way to record COGS when a sales invoice is created or a WIP assembly is made.

Perhaps I will need to use other tools, but for now, I would like to find some 
manual way to get my inventory back to zero on paper
after occasionally owning some to do
service jobs.  At the same time is when I imagine handling the higher sell price
for material even though I see no inventory item units in Gnucash, just money 
units.  So far, I just see dropping using an account Expenses:COGS and just 
working up a report that summarizes that idea for a month.



John Griessen