Payables Aging and Receivables Aging reports

[Derek Atkins]

Graham Stoddart-Stones <gstones at pacifera.com> writes:

> Derek:
>
> Interesting thought from you!   It never occurred to me to set up our A/R and
> A/P in any other way, and I must have missed any documentation that says that
> all A/R and A/P have to be in one account.  I find it hugely helpful to just
> be able to look at A/R and A/P and see immediately the state of every account
> - which is what happens with the sub-accounts that we have set up - and they
> do total very nicely into the parent accounts.  I presume that if I roll them
> all up into the parent account, then one can only see the state of each
> account by running the report (ie one extra step!)?
>
> It leads me to question why Options offers multiple choices of account
> selections for these reports, please? - ie there is a very helpful error
> message that pops up to instruct us to select the account on which to run the
> report, and the drop-down selection of choices includes all the sub-accounts
> in either A/R or A/P as appropriate - which suggests that the designers
> certainly had in mind the possibility of someone setting up sub-accounts
> (although admittedly, the system ignores the selection when one makes it!)

Because it *was* designed to have multiple accounts, because you can
only have one currency per account.  So if you invoice in multiple
currencies you *Need* multiple A/R accounts.  That's why the pull down,
to let you choose among them.

There's a difference between multiple accounts per currency and multiple
accounts per customer!!!  The whole point of the invoicing system was
so that you don't NEED an account per customer.  You could just use the
existing infrastructure if you wanted to do that.

Unfortunately, moving stuff around is going to be hard because of the
business metadata.  You would need to unpost every invoice, delete every
payment, and then re-post them to the right places.

> Looking forward to your thoughts

Umm, start over at your next fiscal year?

> Thank you 
>
> Graham

-derek

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> From: "Derek Atkins" <warlord at MIT.EDU>
> To: "Graham Stoddart-Stones" <gstones at pacifera.com>
> Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Sent: Monday, 18 June, 2012 2:14:08 PM
> Subject: Re: Payables Aging and Receivables Aging reports
>
> Hi,
>
> Graham Stoddart-Stones <gstones at pacifera.com> writes:
>
>> Hi:
>>
>>
>> All our Accounts Payable individual accounts are sub-accounts to Accounts
> Payable. Ditto for Acounts Receivable.
>>
>>
>> There are therefore no individual entries in the parent Accounts Payable and
> Accounts Receivable accounts.
>>
>>
>> In GnuCash, Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable do a wonderful job of
> showing the total of the individual sub-accounts, as one would expect.
>>
>>
>> When running Aging Payable and Aging Receivable reports, however, they both
> show empty - ie there is no consideration of the sub-accounts.
>>
>>
>> I see how to run aging reports separately on the individual sub-accounts. Is
> there a way to get a single aging report which lists the details of each
> sub-account in one report, please, rather than having to run a report for each
> individual sub-account, please?
>
> Why do you have multiple sub-accounts?  The only reason I can imaging
> would be to have multiple currencies.  Alas, no, it's designed to be run
> on a single A/R and A/P account because the system was designed to only
> *have* one A/R or A/P account.
>
>> Thank you
>>
>>
>> Graham
>
>> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>
> -derek
>
> --
>        Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>        Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>        URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>        warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
>

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available