Accounts receivable and invoicing?

Robert Graham Merkel rgmerk@mira.net
Mon, 20 Aug 2001 14:49:11 +1000


I think I might start kicking around ideas for accounts 
receivable/invoicing, in the absence of any other good flamewars
on gnucash-devel at the moment :)

Leaving aside the issues of laying out invoices on possibly 
pre-printed paper and just assuming we'll use good old 
HTML for the moment, there remains the issues of 
"How do we identify bills as going to customer X, and
where do we store customer X's details?"

As a first pass, why not simply have an asset account (parented
under "accounts receivable" grouping account) for each customer,
and attach their details to a kvp frame associated with that
account?  This way, any bill on that customer's account involves
a split to that account, and we have the details available for that
account that we need to invoice them.

A rudimentary "invoice report" would then be relatively simple to construct
with the existing reporting infrastructure.

So, with no changes to the backend, minimal additions to the UI, 
and a report or two, we get a pretty basic, but useful accounts receivable
system.

Of course, if I'm smoking crack here feel free to inform me what kind :)


-- 
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Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk@mira.net

Go You Big Red Fire Engine
-- Unknown Audience Member at Adam Hills standup gig
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