GnuCash can't calculate?!

[Wouter van Marle]

On 21 Jan 10, at 18:33, Geert Janssens wrote:

> On Thursday 21 January 2010, Wouter van Marle wrote:
>> On Wed, 2010-01-20 at 10:20 -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> Another question is are there outstanding invoices from more than a 
>>> year
>>> ago?  Do a search for invoices from this customer and see if the
>>> invoices are marked as paid or not.
>>
>> Most invoices (there are about two dozen of them) are not marked paid.
>> This is a recurring issue to me, for some customers it works, for some
>> not.
>>
> Just to be clear: you have a number of invoices for which you have 
> entered
> payments (and that are payed completely) while GnuCash doesn't 
> indicate them
> as paid ?

Generally I do not link a payment to the invoice (i.e. when entering a 
payment I do not fill in the "invoice" field). Especially in case of 
this customer which involved advance payments and payments for multiple 
invoices at a time.
In my business I have to deal with quality claims and the like, that I 
do by simply amending the invoice (adding a negative amount in it, e.g. 
I sold something at $450, get a claim, and add a second line with the 
same number of units but a price of ($30) for example). So unposting 
and re-posting the invoice.

> That suggests GnuCash has lost track internally of your payments and 
> it's not
> only a display issue.

Well that for sure! There is a credit on their side: they payed more 
than invoiced (partially because of cancelled orders, partially because 
of above mentioned claim issues). It obviously has lost track somewhere 
down the road.

Now for many other customers it also lost track (not marking invoices 
as paid correctly and so), but that marking paid I am not using - 
doesn't make much sense to me as invoices are usually paid in two 
payments, and often several orders outstanding to a single customer at 
one time. The total balance that's what counts to me. In older versions 
you could not link a payment to an invoice, and then it would just mark 
the oldest invoice paid as soon as the amount was large enough: again 
that was in my case sometimes not the invoice that was paid, as a later 
order was delivered earlier.

There is however so far only one customer where I found the totals to 
be off. Many customers (and vendors) have a balance of $0.00 (or 
correct non-zero balance), but with a '0-30 days overdue' of say $4,000 
and '60-90 days overdue' of ($4,000). That is yet another bug, but one 
that doesn't bother me as those payment due dates also don't make sense 
in my business, so I also tend to ignore that part.

It's hard to file a proper bug report because other than "this happens" 
I have no idea on how to replicate it, or why it would be.

Finally I have to admit that I often manually mess around with 
payments, deleting payments to invoices and so. Sometimes because I 
used the wrong currency (happens when you are using three currencies on 
a daily basis), so posted to the wrong account and so. I know that's 
"not allowed" by Derek but it is allowed by GnuCash and for me the 
easiest solution to clean up those mistakes, or to simply remove a 
deposit that has been returned because of cancelled order. All that 
kind of issues.

As you see my business doesn't work like the "average" business - so 
accounting remains a hack job sometimes. Either I remain somewhat 
current and have to make corrections, or I'm hopelessly behind and have 
no way what's going on financially but can enter everything correctly 
after the fact.

Wouter.



> The bugreport I indicated in my previous reply is one way to get into 
> such a
> situation (paying invoices before they are posted).
>
>>> Also, what date did you use for the report?
>>
>> 1/1/09 to now - while indeed the oldest invoices date from 2008.
>>
>> I just re-ran the report with a starting date from before the first
>> invoice or payment from them (the first payment is from before the 
>> first
>> invoice, by the way) and the total doesn't change.
>>
> Indeed, if GnuCash looses track internally, your report won't display
> correctly no matter what you do.
>
> You should get GnuCash into a state that your paid invoices are 
> effectively
> marked as paid.
>
>
> As for the first payment being before the first invoice: this is not
> necessarily a problem. For the bug to trigger it's the action sequence 
> that's
> important, not the actual dates used by the actions.
>
> So it's perfectly fine to
> 1. post an invoice with post date 30/01/2010
> 2. then afterwards add a payment for the invoice with payment date 
> 20/01/2010
>
> while the other way around may corrupt your data:
> 1. make a payment for an unposted invoice
> 2. post the invoice
>
> In your use case (payment before invoice), it should also be ok to
> 1. create a payment for the customer (without choosing a particular 
> invoice!)
> 2. then afterwards create and post an invoice for that customer
> GnuCash should then automatically assign the payment to that invoice 
> (or part
> of the payment, if it is more than the invoice amount).
>
> If it's really this bug you ran into, I'm not sure what to suggest to 
> fix it.
>
> I have remedied one of my books in the past, but I can't recall 
> exactly what I
> did.
>
> I think it was this:
> * Open the Accounts Receivable account
> * Remove all payments for the customer with the corrupt payment 
> information,
> including all automatic payment forwards for that customer, starting 
> from the
> first invoice (with payments) that doesn't show up as paid properly.
> * Be sure all relevant invoices are posted.
> * Enter the payments again.
>
> I hope that helps.
>
> Geert
>
>> Wouter.
>>
>>>> Wouter.
>>>>
>>>> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>>>> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>>>
>>> -derek
>>
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