Feature request: process multiple invoice with single payment

[John Z. Bohach]

On Thursday 09 August 2007 04:29:33 pm Nathan Buchanan wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> On 8/9/07, John Z. Bohach <jzb2 at aexorsyst.com> wrote:
> > On Thursday 09 August 2007 12:23:54 pm Derek Atkins wrote:
> > > Um, gnucash has ALWAYS supported this.  It will pay the invoices
> > > in FIFO order.  If you select an invoice in the process payment
> > > dialog (you dont have to! it's completely optional) then it puts
> > > that invoice at the front of the FIFO, but any overpayment will
> > > then spill over to the next one in the list.  Gnucash has ALWAYS
> > > supported this.
> > >
> > > -derek
> >
> > Sorry then, my misunderstanding...I wasn't quite able to glean that
> > from the documentation or the mail-list archives...this will be
> > very useful.
>
> Hmm, were you eventually able to find the relevant documentation? I'm
> thinking that if you looked around and weren't able to find it, maybe
> we have not placed the documentation where people are expecting it.
> May I ask where you looked first (or tried to look) so that we have
> an idea where the documentation was confusing?
>
> Nathan
>
> Thanks.


I looked in section 12.8 of the tuturial and concepts guide first.  
That's the section on processing payments under the accounts receivable 
chapter.  It states, roughly:


Payment Information - Invoice - the invoice
        for which payment was received. When you select an invoice, the
        Amount field is set to total due for the selected
        invoice.

The phrase "when..." does have an air of optionality about it, but there 
is no mention that entering a larger amount will automatically credit 
the next invoice in line.

Anyway, this is good that we now know this, but I'm not sure this 
addresses the case if a customer pays invoice (let's say) 1 and 3 but 
not 2 on the same check.  For instance, they might be disputing invoice 
2, so they pay 1 and 3.  I guess I could fiddle with the invoice dates 
to get them to credit 3 after 1 (thus skipping 2), and that would work, 
but its not as nice as being able to select multiple invoices from the 
select list, which is in essence what Quickbooks let's you do.

So my preference would be to enhance the "select invoice" dialog box to 
allow multiple selections, say with a shift-click, or ctrl-click, or 
whatever.  That's what I found to be most intuitive.

Secondly, I searched the mail-archives in the gnucash-users list, and 
though I found some discussion of single cheque multiple invoices, I 
never found the solution that Derek mentioned.  In fact, the amount 
being credited in order to the next invoice as Derek explains is also 
not in the concepts guide.

But documentation enhancements aside, I think others have also expressed 
an interest in not always having to do a 'find ...' 
{invoice,customer,etc.} and just rather have a drop down list show 
everything for that category, but that's getting off on a different 
topic.

For this topic, I still might take a stab multiple selections for 
invoices, but I'm the bottom of the learning curve for gnucash, which 
is a perfect place to start...

--john