A response from the trenches

[Robert Locke]

On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 15:59 +1000, Derrick Ashby wrote:
> 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>

What about the Cash Flow report?  I use that as my P&L for my business -
had to modify the accounts it drew from, but it works for me for "Cash"
accounting (of course, I don't have GST to deal with)...

--Rob