Finding Invoice Type "?" / CSV Import Help

[Benjamin Soffer (SLF)]

Thanks, Geert.  Yes, I am sure I cannot delete the offending invoice.  When I try to delete the transaction, I get this message:

 

“Cannot modify or delete this transaction.  This transaction is marked read-only with the comment: ‘Generated from an invoice.  Try unposting the invoice.’ “

 

Of course, to unpost the invoice I have to first “find” the invoice.  But GC cannot find it with the “find invoice” tool.  Thus, I’m stuck.

 

I have not imported any transactions.  Every transaction in my GC was entered manually.

 

Benjamin E. Soffer ♦ THE SOFFER LAW FIRM PC

T  818.963.8998

21550 Oxnard Street, Suite 300

Woodland Hills, CA 91367-7109

 <http://www.soffer-law.com/> www.soffer-law.com

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Thank you.

 

 

From: Geert Janssens [mailto:geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be] 
Sent: Friday, January 8, 2016 1:02 AM
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org; bsoffer at soffer-law.com
Subject: Re: Finding Invoice Type "?" / CSV Import Help

 

On Wednesday 06 January 2016 14:17:34 Benjamin Soffer wrote:

> Hello,

> 

> 

> 

> I am running GC 2.6.10 in Windows 8.1 and am new to GC.

> 

> 

> 

> I spent hours entering all my transactions, including a number of

> invoices. I have also "processed payments" for most of the invoices. 

> I have no idea how this happened, but somehow a few of the invoices

> got messed up. They are being listed in the AR account, but their

> type has changed to "?" (the other invoices are type "I"). Although

> the ? invoices are displayed and their amount is counted, they cannot

> be "found" using the "find invoice" tool using any of the options

> (e.g., invoice number, client name, date, etc.). I understand that

> they cannot be deleted (even if I could find them), but I wanted to

> change their amount to 0 so that the accounting for the clients is

> not distorted by their amounts.

> 

Are you sure you can't just delete the transactions of type "?" ? I would expect you can. A "?" type transaction generally indicates a transaction that was entered outside of the business features.

 

Have you been importing transactions via one of the importers perhaps ?

 

> 

> 

> So I thought I could get rid of them by exporting everything to CSV

> files, removing the offending transactions from the applicable asset

> and income CSVs, and then importing the all the CSVs into a new GC

> file, which I would use going forward. The problem is that I have no

> idea how to correctly map the CSV columns to the proper GC

> categories. Besides, there are a lot more columns than there are

> available categories.

> 

As Chris already suggested: the CSV importer would not help here, because the general importer is not aware of the business features and wouldn't be able to reconstruct your invoices properly.

 

> 

> 

> Ideally, I would like a way to "find" the bad invoices and fix them. 

> Absent that, I would appreciate any help with how to properly import

> the CSV files.

> 

First try to delete them directly from the A/R account. If that fails, what error message do you get ?

 

Regards,

 

Geert