Struggling with vendor payments

[Andrew Greig]

Hi all,

I was following this list for quite some time while operating under MYOB 
(Australian version).  Now I have left that organisation and I am able 
to do my own thing with gnucash.  I am not an accountant and I struggle 
with administration most of the time.  I am struggling with "Vendor 
payments".

Initially I entered each of my parking receipts as a separate 'invoice", 
but I found the process of always having to "search" for the same vendor 
was tedious, so now I have lumped them all into one invoice with docket 
numbers on the different dates, and I "pay" them at the end of the month 
out of petty cash, whereas in fact I put the money in the meter on each 
particular day.  Is ther any way to short cut this continual search for 
the same vendor?  If I have 15 items from the same vendor, is there a 
"Save & Next" facility to speed up my data entry?

While on vendor payments, some of my payments (for one parking docket  
for example) are split into 3 payments of unequal amounts $4.40 is 
broken into $0.40 and $1.80 and $2.20.  In some other cases in the 
register, the payment precedes the invoice and the running balances look 
very untidy.

Is it possible to lump all of the invoices for one vendor into one place 
for payment with one amount?  I can't seem to find this feature referred 
to in the manual.  Perhaps domestic blindness has set in, can't find my 
socks some time.

I am operating under an Australian GST system.  I have GST collected and 
GST Paid both in my Liabilities section, and when the time comes to fill 
out the business activity statement for the government I can deduct one 
from the other and make the appropriate payment or request a refund.

Using gc1.8.9 Mandrake 10.1

Many thanks

Andrew Greig
Community Distributor, OpenOffice.org