A few business questions

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Laurent Duperval <lduperval at videotron.ca> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to get my head around the whole business module and I have
> a few (a lot?) of questions. Here goes:
>
> - Can I set up two types of invoices, one in French and the other in
> English?

The invoice will print in whatever locale you've set.  Set your locale
to French and the invoice will be printed in French.  Set your locale
to English and theinvoice will be printed in English.

There's no way to change your locale in the running process.

> - I sent a customer an invoice for 1100$, of which, 100$ was for
> taxes. When that customer pays back the 1100$, how do I tell the
> process payment dialog to put 100$ in my taxes account?

As Elizabeth said, you should set up Tax Tables ahead of time and
earmark that $100 into your "Tax" account.  The gnucash business
modules record transactions on an accrual basis, so the tax is
accounted for when you make the sale, not when you are paid.  The
reports will (eventually) be able to report in either accrual OR cash
accounting, thereby discounting the transactions for invoices that
have not been paid.

> - When I enter new transactions in the normal gnucash module (not the
> business module), auto-completion fills in an entire line for me. In
> the business module, it only fills out the description. When doing
> consulting work, I often re-enter the exact same thing. How do I get
> GC to complete the whole line, so I only need to change the number of
> hours.

Full autocompletion has not been implemented, so, no, there's no way
to do this yet.

> - Speaking of which, I bill certain customers on a daily basis instead
> of an hourly basis. Is there a way to reflect that? Same for weekly or
> monthly.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this.  There's no way to input a
date-range, but you could put something in the notes.  There's also no
way to duplicate an existing invoice.

> - Can I enter a "split" invoice Item? For example, say I bill a
> customer weekly but I need to detail the hours during the week, can I
> do something like this:
>
> 2004-09-09  Consulting     20 hours     50.00    1000.00
>             Talking        5 Hours      50.00     250.00
>             Listening      12 Hours     50.00     600.00
>             Sleeping       3 Hours      50.00     150.00

There is no such thing as a "split" invoice item.  Each line-item by
definition is a "split", so just create multiple line-items.

If you want to group items together you should use "jobs", but how
that works isn't fully implemented, yet.  Eventually I'd like to get
different outstanding Jobs grouped together on the invoice.  But
that's not finished.

> - Are there tricks to speeding up data entry? For example, I don't
> have many customers so going through the whole search dialog all the
> time is a bit of overkill. Is there a faster way?

Unfortunately no, not yet.  Reference the discussions about phrase
wheels.  :)

> I think that's enough for now. I'll have more tomorrow. :-)

Ok.

-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