Newbie few item questions

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Tuc at Beach House <tuc at tucs-beachin-obx-house.com> writes:

> 	1) I started entering information on a Business/Vendor/New Bill
> and found I totally stuffed it up. I was able to delete the line items,
> but how do I remove the invoice itself? Its unposted with no line items.

You can't.  Just re-use the invoice for your next invoice.

> 	2) When I went to go look at a payment I entered, it seemed to be
> showing as a split for 19.20 and 19.20 making a $38.40 payment. However,
> I'm fairly sure I put it in as 156.59 without any payment splits. Where /
> what / how did this appear?

Payments are posted in FIFO order against the Invoice Owner (Customer
or Vendor)..  So if you have multiple invoices posted for a particular
customer, it will post a payament against the first invoice (in date
order) first.  If you over-pay this invoice, gnucash will create
Automatic Payment Forward transactions to "move" the extra money from
one invoice to another.

> 	3) To resolve #2, I went into the Cash Account, found the line item
> and just deleted it. I went back to the payments for bills, found the bill
> and paid the bill in full. NOW I have 2 line items that show in my 
> Accounts Payable as "Automatic Payment Forward" for 19.20, another for -19.20,
> the original incorrect payment with the check number is showing as -19.20 and
> there is an entry for $137.39. But there is nothing about the 156.59 that
> I entered... What the? If I do a Vendor search, then show bills, the "paid"
> column is not checked. When I go back to the Assets:Current Assets:Cash
> in Wallet and look at the payment, it now shows it was split into 19.20,
> 137.39 in my "Liabilities:Accts Payable". Why? I didn't split it when I
> put it in. Infact I don't know how to split it when I enter it.

I suggest you remove the payment transactions and the Automatic
Payment Forward transactions and then repost the payment.   I've
never been able to reproduce the work-flow that causes a problem
with these Payment Forward transactions, but some people have been
able to get themselves into a broken situation... 

Without being able to reproduce the situation I have no idea how it
gets into this bogus state..  But..  Removing the payments and the
automatic-forwards and repositing the payments seems to solve the
problem.

> 	4) Is there a way to print a report that would be 
>
> VENDOR	
>
> Date	Reference	Type	Amount
>
> 	So I can see in one place all the bills and associated payments
> for each vendor? 

Um, have you tried the Vendor Report?  Reports -> Business -> Vendor Report

> 	5) Speaking of reports, unfortunately I'm not able to program
> in the report language... Is there anyone who's made an "addition pack"
> of reports possibly?

All reports that have been created have been incorporated into GnuCash
and shipped.  Is there a report you think you need that GnuCash doesn't
already have?

BTW: Learning scheme is fairly simple.  Any software engineer should
be able to understand the syntax of Scheme in under a day..  Learning
the rest should be little more than a week of study.

> 	Is there some procedure or practice I might not be following
> properly? It seems to be modifying transactions as I put them in.

"It"?  Not sure what kind of transactions are being modified...  But
yes, GnuCash is going to try to auto-balance stuff for you.  The
business features in particular are going to migrate the payments
to make sure you can pay multiple invoices with a single payment.

In 1.8 you cannot pay an invoice directly (but you can in 1.9).

-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