Post to account in post dialog vs payment dialog

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> writes:

> Both the Post... dialog and the Payment dialog have a field to select an 
> account to post the invoice resp. payment to.
>
> In my experience for a given invoice and it's associated payments, this should 
> always be the same account. For a different invoice with it's associated 
> payments, this could be a different account.
>
> Also should you post an invoice to one A/P and its payments to another A/P, 
> GnuCash will not consider this invoice as paid.

Note that you don't pay an invoice, you pay a vendor (or a customer).
GnuCash assigns those payments in FIFO order, but it does allow you to
optionally select an invoice that gets put at the front of the FIFO.

Yes, if you DO select an invoice to be at the front of the FIFO the
dialog should force you to use the same Post-To account as the invoice.

Also note, however, that the original intent was only to have different
A/R accounts based on different currencies, so you'd have A/R USD, A/R
GBP, A/R EUR, etc.

> Do you know of any use case where this would not be the case ? I mean are 
> there use cases where you
> * create an invoice,
> * post it to A/P 1
> * and post the payments to A/P 2

Potentially, if you invoice in currency A and receive payment in
currency B..  But even in that case there's not a good way to link them.

> If not, I see an opportunity improve GnuCash' intelligence. If so, then we 
> should fix GnuCash that is knows the invoice is paid even when the payments 
> are posted to a different A/P than the invoice.

The 'paid' status is defined by a closed lot.

> Most users will probably never hit this issue, as you need to have more the 
> one A/P account to see it.

That was the intent.

> I have 3 different A/P accounts. Most invoices are posted to A/P 1, and some 
> are posted to A/P 2 and A/P 3.

Why do you have multiple A/P accounts?

> As things stand now I always have to remember which A/P account I posted the 
> invoice to in order to select the proper one when I pay it. If I select a 
> different A/P account for the invoice and it's payments, the invoice never 
> gets the status paid.

Right, and that's not necessarily a bug.

The dialog and processes were all designed before you could select that
'first invoice in the FIFO'.  So it would look in the selected A/R
account for any invoices for your selected customer and then build a
FIFO from them.

Like I said, I agree that if you DO select an invoice it should force
you to use that invoice's A/R account.

If you do NOT select an invoice then it should let you choose the A/R
Account.

> Geert

-derek

-- 
       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 at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available