Handling Debit Opening Balances for Customers

[Geert Janssens]

On Thursday 17 September 2015 05:51:32 Nelson Handcock wrote:
> Hi Geert,
> 
> Thanks for your responses.
> 
> On my version of GN, your proposal does not work if there is no
> invoice in existence for the customer.
> 
> When I choose the Business -> Customer -> Process Payment:
>  I select the customer name, (there is no invoice for the customer so
> nothing shows up in the "Documents" list), enter the amount, choose
> the Opening Balances account. There is a yellow warning icon and the
> "OK" button is greyed out.
> 
> When I hover my mouse of the warning icon, I see a message "You must
> select at least one document or pre-payment to process".
> 
> 
> If you are seeing something different please advise - perhaps I need
> to upgrade to a newer version of GN?
> 
> 
You are correct. I already had forgotten about that bug. This particular issue has been fixed in a 
later gnucash version (by yours truly).

In 2.6.5 and later you can create payments again without pre-existing invoices (as you could in 
2.4.x and before).

The same applies to "Assign as payment" I believe. Your workaround of creating a temporary 
invoice is a good one if you don't want to upgrade just yet. You can recycle the temporary 
invoices later on anyway when real invoices are being created.

I would advise though to upgrade to at least gnucash 2.6.5 for another reason: older versions 
were very liberal in the use of lot links when assigning payments to invoices [1]. The algorithms 
used were not very robust and could result in splintered transactions, slowing down gnucash *a 
lot*.

Most of these issues were fixed in gnucash 2.6.5. The updates to check & repair to clean up the 
possible mess only made it in 2.6.6 so I'd even consider at least that version.

Regards,

Geert

[1] 
http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Correcting_Business_Transaction_Mistakes#Swamped_in_lot_link_tra
nsactions