Credit notes analysis

[Graham Leggett]

On 11 Sep 2011, at 11:26 PM, Geert Janssens wrote:

> I have spent some time to investigate what is needed to support  
> credit notes
> in GnuCash. The result of my analysis can be found here:
> http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Credit_Notes
>
> For simplicity I'm using the term "credit note" as the inverse of  
> all invoice
> types we support so far (Bill/Invoice/Employee Voucher), not just  
> for customer
> related transactions.
>
> My conclusion would be that it should be possible to support credit  
> notes
> without any change to the data model, although maybe one internally  
> used field
> might hold some new values. It will require a minimal set of  
> compatibility
> fixes the the current stable GnuCash version to  avoid some unwanted
> confusion, but those are minimal.
>
> I intend to start with an implementation of this fairly soon.
>
> I'm welcoming all feedback, questions, remarks,...

At its simplest, credit notes are just debit notes with a negative  
sign, and it would be ideal if that's all they need to be. In other  
words, regardless of the amounts on the invoice/bill, the total amount  
can be negative or positive, and gnucash just gets on with it.

Where I've had to fiddle with this before to apply payments, I've  
discovered that the code that allocates payments to invoices/bills  
assumes that the payment has a specific sign. We would just need to  
teach this algorithm to behave sensibly with payments and invoice/ 
bills of either sign, and it should work fine.

In the absence of another way to do it, we modify the gnucash file in  
a text editor (and version control the gnucash file in svn) to reverse  
the sign of credit notes, we just haven't had a way of doing it before.

Regards,
Graham
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