Imported invoices and other problems...

[Phil Longstaff]

On April 28, 2009 11:58:41 am defaria wrote:
> I've recently moved from Windows and Quicken Home & Business 2009 to LInux
> and GnuCash. Right now my biggest concern is handling my invoices. I'm sure
> I'll have many other questions in the future. Be gentle, GnuCash is new to
> me.
>
> I exported all of my Quicken transactions to a QIF file and imported them
> into GnuCash. GnuCash now reports I'm 1/4 of million in the hole! I assure
> you this is not the case.
>
> Looking into it I see one account, my Invoices account from Quicken H&B
> 2009, is at like negative 1/2 a million! Obviously this is wrong.  Looking
> at the Invoices account, every transaction imported merely reduces the
> balance by the transaction amount. IOW it just goes negative. This Invoices
> account is listed as a Bank account type. Should it be a "Bank" account
> type? Apparently these were never converted properly into invoices. How
> would I convert them?

What is an "Invoices account"?  I see your reference to it, and I see a 
reference to it in the QIF reference xl2qif.chez-alice.fr/download/QIF99.pdf 
but I don't see exactly what they are.  In Q H&B 2009, what do they contain?

>
> In trying to create a new Invoice I also wanted to create a new Job. When
> doing so GnuCash apparently aborts - the window goes away. Started up
> gnucash from a terminal and tried just Business: New Job. It worked. Tried
> to create a new job from the Find Job screen. Created a dummy job. Now I'd
> like to delete it. How? Found new dummy job. Selected inactive.
> Segmentation fault! Ugh! Seems buggy to me!

If this is reproducible, please log details to bugzilla.gnome.com.

> Trying again. BTW could the find job/customer/invoice dialogs be a bit mroe
> friendly? Often you just want to "Find all" but there's no easy way to do
> that. I found I could match for a regex of ".*" but that should be the
> default or at least easily doable.
>
> Now I can't find any jobs! Tried to create one form the Find Job dialog.
> "7fa9676f1000-7fa9676fd000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 270879   Aborted".
> Wonderful! Can't create a job from the Business: Customer: New Job dialog
> either.
>
> Apparently gnucash blows up if the account type is wrong. In trying to
> figure out why my Invoices account was at like 1/2 a million negative I
> toggled it from a "Bank" account to an "Income" account. That flipped the
> negative amount to a positive amount but wiped all the jobs. Creating a job
> on an Income account crashes gnucash! Funny, you'd think you make income at
> a job. Well whatever...
>
> OK, not terms. In creating an invoice there is a terms drop down. All
> that's there is "None". How do I set tha that to something other than
> "None". I looked around but could find nothing about Terms.
>
> OK, on to the accounting issues/questions. First off, what's an Income
> account? In Quicken H&B my Invoices account was of type Invoice. Invoices
> could be created there as well as payments processed, etc. When a payment
> was received and I entered a payment the proceeds would be deposited into
> my business checking account by means of a transfer.

Gnucash uses standard double-entry accounting.  When you create and send an 
invoice, this represents an increase in income as well as an increase in your 
receivables asset account.  When a customer pays you, this represents an 
increase in your bank balance and decrease in your receivables.  One of the 
issues I had with quicken is that it does *not* use double-entry accounting 
(though quickbooks does).
 
>
> Here I'm asked for an Income account. My business checking account is not
> listed as an Income account. So I think "From what I've heard this GnuCash
> seems to make an account per category when compared to Quicken". I used to
> categories this income as "Consulting" and lo and behold there is a
> Consulting account listed in the drop down. So I select it.

Your checking account is an asset.  When you spend money, you used to use a 
Quicken category.  Now, you decrease checking account and increase the 
particular expense account.  When you receive income, in Q, you use a 
category.  In Gnucash, you increase an income account.

>
> When I go to "Post" this invoice it asks for a Post to Account and all I
> see there is "Wallet". Well I don't post to my wallet account but the only
> other option is to create a new account and the only account type is
> "A/Receivable". So I create a new account and name it Invoices. To my
> surprise it works! Now I  have two accounts, both named Invoices, one a
> bank account and one an A/Receivable account. Am I supposed to "post"
> invoices to "Invoices" a "A/Receivable" account and then enter yet another
> transaction to get the money out of the Invoices account and deposited into
> my Business checking account?

It sounds as though you need to read 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounts_receivable.

>
> Oh, OK, just tried a Process Payment and it seems to address these issues.
> I can enter the Customer, Invoice, etc. It has a Post To account as well as
> a Transfer Account.
>
> Sorry for all the confusion. As expected this will take some time to get
> used to. Please be gentle and patient with me. I'll come around -
> eventually!

If you have concrete ideas on how to improve the interface, please provide 
them.

Phil