Mandatory Customer Addresses - Why?

[Wm]

Sat, 16 Aug 2014 19:38:22 <53EF42AE.9010002 at windwanderer.com.au>  Jesse 
the Wind Wanderer <jesse at windwanderer.com.au>

>Dear GNU Cash Development Team,
>First can I say thank you for creating a professional accounting 
>software for linux and doing so as an open source project! You guys 
>ROCK! In fact your part of the reason I switched to linux in the first 
>place. You see when I started my business in 2006 I didn't have any 
>money and decided that if I was going to run a business I couldn't use 
>pirated software. I found GNUCash and the decision was made :-)
>
>My question today is why are customer addresses mandatory? I'm a 
>performer and I often do gigs at parks & public places. My clients pay 
>me cash and I never need to know their actual address. Sure I can enter 
>a dummy address like "Unknown" but I wanted to ask if there was a 
>reason for making this field mandatory, is it used as an index in a 
>database? or is there some other programmatic reason it is required? or 
>was it just a user interface choice? If it's just an interface choice 
>could you please add an option to turn it off in the preferences.

There is no conceptual art or creative accounting involved.

If you have actual customers (Festival A, Fete B, Convention C) then 
Cash Receipts is just another (albeit generic) customer.  I'd have 
thought you'd want to distinguish between various cash performance areas 
(Glastonbury or Edinburgh, etc) to see which was best for next year, no 
harm in accounting for them separately.

Note: no addresses are involved yet, just notions and concepts of 
customer.

However, if you *only* have cash receipts and no customers then you 
needn't run Accounts Receivable / Debtors / whatever they are called 
where you are at all as those accounts are mainly about managing money 
hoped for or expected rather than money already caught in a hat.

-- 
Wm...