Accounts receivable and invoicing?

[Derek Atkins]

Robert,

Let's say you've got your A/R account with sub-accounts Alice and Bob
(your two customers).  I've also got a lot of other accounts, too.  I
do some billable work for Alice, let's say the work includes Time and
Materials (and I have separate accounts for my workers, too, to track
their individual time recording, too).  So, how would the splits look
in such a situation?

For example, let's say that Sam and Tom, my two workers, each work 4
hours for Alice and 4 hours for Bob.  They collectively spend $100 in
materials for Alice, and $150 for Bob (I'm making this simple and not
talking about numbers of widgets here ;).  Also, don't forget that Sam
and Tom have different hourly costs associated with them.

I'm just trying to visualize the transactions and how they would get
split.  It also looks like you would never actually split transactions
into the A/R account itself; all splits would go into the
sub-accounts.  Is that true?  Is that what you had in mind?

-derek

Robert Graham Merkel <rgmerk@mira.net> writes:

> 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 :)
> 
> 
> -- 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk@mira.net
> 
> Go You Big Red Fire Engine
> -- Unknown Audience Member at Adam Hills standup gig
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-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord@MIT.EDU                        PGP key available