Help with GNUCASH for some transaction options

[DaveC49]

HI Winlux,

In the example I used a Asset:Bank  account as the intermediary for the two
payment transactions. It is not a fake account as such. If the transactions
to this account cause you problems, there is no reason you cannot intoduce a
dummy asset (or liability) account for this purpose. When the two
transactions are completed, the balance in the account will be zero. The
Imbalance account acts a bit like this when it is used as the target for
splits which were not assigned to a specific account. Any non-zero balance
in it indicates that a transaction has a split not directed at a specific
account. You could give it any name that was appropriate or made sense to
you e.g Asset:CustomerVendorTransfer.

Also using the word dummy is probably not appropriate ( but I couldn't think
of a better term at the time). The payments using the Business features to
execute them while not reflecting actual physical transactions in that the
money wasn't directly handed over in each case are still reflecting the
effective transaction virtual transactions which occur when you agree to
offset what you owe the vendor by what the vendor owes you.  You have
recorded the two events in your accounts in raising an invoice to them as a
customer for the meal and a bill to them as a vendor for your purchases and
recording the payments against that bill and invoice. It is the second
payment which cancels out the first entry into the bank account.

The receivables and payables ageing reports will tell you about what you owe
and what is owed to you. 

To see what payments you have made and have been made to you you could use
the Customer and Vendor reports but you would have to prepare them for each
and every customer and each and every Vendor.  


For your second problem  the transactions which created the debt to company
A will be of the form ( i have only illustrated a single transaction
equivalent to the multiples you describe. Assuming these are invoices

Expense                           Db 1000
Liability:A/P:CompanyA                     Cr    1000

A dummy ( for want of a better term) payment to erase this debt would be of
the form

Liability:A/P:CompanyA   Db  1000
Liability:TransferAccount                       Cr 1000

and the second dummy payment would be

You could then create an Bill from Company C for the 1000 amount specifying
the transfer account where you would normally specify an Expense account.
The resulting splits of the transaction will look like.

Liability:TransferAccount    Db 1000
Liability:A/P:CompanyC                    Cr 1000

Again the resulting balance of these two transactions in the
Liability:TransferAccount would be zero. The choice of  a Liability or Asset
account for this transfer account is completely arbitrary as it would also
be for your first problem where we illustrated it using an Asset:Bank 
account.

Again you could alternatively manually enter the splits and simply do 

Liability:A/P:CompanyA   Db  1000
Liability:A/P:CompanyC                    Cr 1000

and eliminate the use of a transfer account.  This has the disadvantage if
you use the business features you have no resulting  Bill from CompanyC to
record your payments to them against.  If you annotate the Memo fields in
the transactions to show what you are doing and explainit should be clear to
yourself and your accountant what you have done and why.

If the above is not making a lot of sense you may need to gain a better
understanding of double entry bookkeeping, the accounting equation and the
relationship between debits and credits on the various account classes. Try
looking those terms up in Wikipedia as the explanantion given there is
pretty good then look at the GnuCash user guide.

I'm not sure how to get the information you want out of transaction reports.
It may involve an appropriate choice of the account to report transactions
i.e A/R and A/P from and the target account for those transactions. If you
click on Reports->Transaction Reports and click the link to edit the report
Options you will get a dialog where you can play with the various options to
get what you want. I am not aware of an option for just reporting payments
though.

Cheers

David Cousens



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