"Internal Lot Links" mess in Accounts Receivable

[David Beattie]

Hi,

I'm new to this e-mail list, and I'm not sure if this discussion better belongs in the -devel e-mail list.  If so, I apologize, and somebody please let me know and I can ask it again over there, but my best guess was to ask it here.

I am a long-time user of GnuCash for business purposes, since the 2.2 versions.  I just upgraded to 2.6.0 as soon as it was released.  Overall I am liking the new business features in concept, especially things like credit notes, and explicitly marking payments as applying to multiple specific invoices.  Unfortunately some of what I'm about to mention is probably feedback I should gave given during the "beta" testing phase (2.5 releases), but, since using GnuCash is critical for my business, I didn't want to risk data corruption, so I waited until 2.6 to even try it.

One thing that I think is unsatisfactory, is the way the Accounts Receivable works now.  Probably because of the new support for credit notes and the new explicit multiple-invoice payment feature I like, EVERY posted payment now incurs a "Lot Link" transaction in the Accounts Receivable register.  The problem with this is several fold:

1) It clutters the Accounts Receivable register.  Rather than just two items per invoice (the invoice itself and the payment), there are now 4 showing, since the "lot link" takes up 2 lines on the screen,... and even worse, the lot links are not visibly associated with any payment, except by date, so it sometimes takes extra thought and guesswork to figure out what they belong to if this ever becomes necessary.  If they had a reference number of the invoice, or check/payment number, that they were associated with, at least it would be definitively clear which invoice or check they belonged to.
2) The only association of a "Lot Link" transaction to the actual invoice and payment seems to be the date, BUT, if I enter a payment with the wrong date, then the "Lot Link" entries are given the date I mistakenly gave to the payment.  This means if I change the date on the payment, but not on the Lot Link entries, then the Lot Link entries are now in a random place in the timeline, and the only way to track them down is by the transaction amount, assuming that even matches.
3) Deleting payments no longer works (at least, not easily).  Sometimes I make a mistake when entering a payment.  While I can imagine a dialog-based user interface to take care of this issue, none exists in GnuCash, so my old solution was to simply find the errant payment in the Accounts Receivable register, or in the asset account that the payment was transferred to, and delete it.  Now, I have to not only delete the payment, but the lot link transaction.  If I don't delete the lot link transaction, then the invoice is still marked as paid, which is WRONG, since the payment no longer exists in Accounts Receivable.  If, on the other hand, I delete the lot link transaction only, and not the actual payment, then it is no longer marked as paid, which is also wrong, since the payment is still listed and the accounts receivable would still reconcile for that customer.
4) Un-posting and re-posting invoices no longer works, in any way.  If I process payment for an invoice, then later need to modify the invoice, to add to it, for example (which would render it only partially paid, with an amount due), or even to edit details such as the account a line item was associated with, then re-post the invoice, the older versions of GnuCash would automatically re-associate the payment with the invoice, and it would automatically be marked as paid (or partially paid, depending on the circumstances).  In 2.6.0, this no longer works.  The Lot Link transaction goes away when the invoice is un-posted.  There is an "Assign As Payment" menu item for each transaction, but I've never successfully made this work yet for any purpose.  In this circumstance, it brings up an empty dialog box with no invoices available to be paid, despite the fact that the invoice is NOT marked as paid anymore.  The normal/new "process payment" dialog box
 shows the previous payment available as a "pre-payment", and shows the invoice needing to be paid, but even trying to enter a $0.00 psuedo-payment to associate the two fails, because a payment of $0.00 is not accepted.  I have to assume that the "pre-payment" functionality of 2.4 and earlier GnuCash is completely broken now?  The only solution I can find is to write the payment details on a scrap of paper, delete it, and re-enter it after the invoice is re-posted.
5) Clearly these lot links are still optional internally, because all my old invoices before the 2.6 upgrade are still marked as paid, correctly, without them.  So I have old data that is not cluttered, and new data that is cluttered, but no way to enter data in the old, uncluttered way, since the "lot links" are automatically generated and the new payments don't work without them.

6) The comment on the splits says "Internal link between invoice and payment lots".  In my opinion as a user, "Internal" means I shouldn't have to see it.  So I was looking for a way to hide them, but there is no filter to filter out transactions by type, so I have to see the "Internal" data, which I would rather hide except when briefly necessary in order to de-tangle some problem (like when deleting payments).  This bothers me philosophically.

Is there a plan to eliminate this mess in a future release?  I hope so!  For now I can live with it, it just makes correcting minor mistakes, or changing anything about an invoice or a payment after the fact, a BIG pain.  In my opinion, the Lot Links should be re-thought completely, and gotten rid of, and the concept re-engineered in a simpler way that doesn't have all the problems I mentioned above.  I'm tempted to go back to version 2.4.15 until this is addressed, but not sure if the data file would be backwards compatible so I'm scared to downgrade.

Best regards,
David Beattie