Bills showing for payment when they are already paid: gnucash 2.6.2

[Geert Janssens]

On Thursday 06 March 2014 08:59:43 gdauk wrote:
> I'm using gnucash 2.6.2 and on startup I'm shown bills requiring
> payment that have already been paid through the business vendor
> payment process.
> 
> Looking in the A/P register I see that for these payments there are no
> 'L' or 'link' transactions.
> 
> These bills have been unposted and reposted so I think the links may
> get broken if the bill is un-posted and are not automatically
> re-established when the bill is reposted.
> 
These links are not "broken", but deliberately removed. The moment you unpost a bill GnuCash 
no longer associates the existing payment with this bill.

This behaviour is new in the 2.6 series. It was introduced because there were reports [1] of 
incorrect transactions being generated after reposting a bill that already was paid. Apart from 
these reported issues there are several other ways you can change an unposted bill that cause 
the payment no longer to match the bill in some way. The worst case is no doubt posting the bill 
to a different AP account.

> It appears that you can 're-link' these transactions by selecting the
> appropriate payment entry in the A/P register and using the context
> menu item 'Assign as Payment' to open the payment facility and select
> the bill item for payment and make the link again.
> 
> My questions are:
> 
> 1. Is using the 'assign as payment' option the right way to solve this
> problem?
> 
Assign as payment was originally not written for this use case but it can be used for cases 
where the payment amount is equal or less than the unpaid amount on the invoice.

> 1. How do I deal with the situation where the link appears to have
> broken on a bill that has an overpayment so when I go to 'assign as
> payment' there are 'pre-payments' showing that don't relate directly
> by value to any one particular bill?
> 
You can use Business->Vendor->Process Payment to handle this. When it opens you can select 
the bill and pre-payment you want to link and -important- set the amount (payment and refund) 
to 0. That last step is important because you don't want to create another payment transaction 
(which would happen with a non-zero amount).

> 2. Is the appearance of these bills needing payment altho' they are
> actually already paid a bug that will likely be fixed at some point
> in the future?
> 
The real bug in my opinion is that you can unpost a bill that is already (partly) paid. At the very 
least this should emit a warning to the user about the consequences.

However having said that I also realize that the reworked invoice/credit note/payment logic in 
2.6 has some rough edges still. I intend to revisit this when time permits to improve the 
experience where data integrity restrictions allow for it.

Geert

[1] For example https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=488035 and 
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=143418