New bill creates a new invoice

Derek Atkins warlord at MIT.EDU
Tue Feb 18 11:55:28 EST 2014


Hi,

Cristian Marchi <cri79 at libero.it> writes:

> Thanks Geert, [1] is surely the same problem I reported when it's
> clear that there is a difference between customer and vendor jobs. In
> fact, I was expecting only a unique job definition to which you can
> link customer (generally one) and vendors.
>
> I was simulating a scenario where you get commissioned by a customer
> for a job and you need materials from different vendors to accomplish
> the job. At the moment I can't see the advantages to have jobs defined
> separately for customer and vendors. Can you make some example so that
> I can better understand (and document) the principles behind the
> implementation?

A "Job" is really a misnomer.  It's more like a "Contract".  The idea
behind it was to provide a way to combine multiple orders from one
vendor or multiple invoices to one customer.  For example, you have a
contract with a customer that will involve invoicing them monthly over a
6 month period.  You can use a Job to record that those invoices are
tied to that particular contract.  This might be important if, e.g., you
had multiple contracts with the same customer an needed to keep them
separate.  The same concept for a vendor: you might have a multiple
contracts with a vendor and want to keep track of which bill applies to
which contract.

That's why "Job" is really a misnomer.  It's NOT a way to tie income an
expenses together.  It doesn't tie Vendors and Customers.  Such a thing
really never existed (and still doesn't exist) in the GnuCash framework.
The closest option is the chargeback functionality where you can specify
expenses on a vendor bill that will get charged through to a customer.

I hope this explains the history and current status of this feature?

> Thanks
> Cristian

-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
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