A response from the trenches

Derrick Ashby daeroncs at fastmail.fm
Mon Apr 25 01:59:08 EDT 2005


Derek Atkins wrote:

>Quoting Derrick Ashby <daeroncs at fastmail.fm>:
>
>  
>
>>I suppose it depends what you mean by both "basic" and "accounting
>>feature". Personally, I'd like to see the ability to use cash accounting
>>rather than accrual accounting for business income and business taxes. I
>>can't really convert our business fully to gnucash unless that happens.
>>    
>>
>
>That's purely a reporting issue; you just need to subtract your A/R from Income
>and A/P from Expenses.  It's really not hard to "fix" after the fact; it's just
>that the current reports dont back-track for you.
>  
>
OK, let's just rehearse this:

When an invoice is created, it is entered as an Accounts Receivable,
which is an asset.  No problem there - if someone owes you money, tht is
an asset of the business.  The balancing transaction goes into an
Income->Sales account.  In every report this is going to be by default
selected as income.  To "fix" this I need to go into every report and
change the options to deselect that account.  The tax component goes
into a Liability account (Liabilities->GST Receivable I call this one).

When an invoice is paid, the amount is deducted from Accounts Receivable
and added to the Cheque Account.  I currently manually transfer the tax
paid from GST Receivable to GST Collected.  I suspect that what you want
me to do is create a new Income account (say Income->Sales->Receipts)
and do a transfer from Income->Sales->Invoices?  The reports then need
to include the new account, and exclude the old one.

While I could implement this just by creating a few accounts, entering a
heap of transactions to move income that has already come in and then
modifying the reports that look at income accounts,there is a problem,
which is all the bugs in the report saving code - to quote from a
previous email exchange:

[snip]

>> cards) When I renamed the saved-reports-1.8 file, the Liabilities
>> barchart turned up in the menu. Remind me not to save another report
>> definition, will you?
>  
>

Heh!  I'll try.  There are a LOT of known bugs in the "save reports"
functionality.


>> 
>
It's a pain in the arse having to recreate reports when for one reason
or another gnucash refuses to load the ones I have previously set up. 
The more properties that one needs to remember to change in the report
options, the more likelihood there is that you are going to make a mistake.

The same is true when entering manual transactions.  The more you need
to enter, the greater possibility there is for errors to creep in. 
Computer programs are supposed to reduce work, not increase it. 

I would like to be able to tell gnucash that I use cash accounting, and
have the progam enter all those manual transactions.  To say that it is
"purely a reporting issue" doesn't really help, sorry.

Derrick



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