More Questions Accounts Receivable and Billing

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Quoting Robert Smits <bob at rsmits.ca>:

> I confess I don't understand this, Derek.
>
> Why can't I use the accounts receivable I've already established?

Because an Opening Balance wont be noticed by the Business Reports.

> And how do you actually make an invoice?

Business -> Customer -> New Invoice

> I have added accounts receivable and customer accounts for each local I want
> to send an invoice to.
>
> When I go to business, customer, new invoice, it starts off opening a window
> in which I have invoice id, date, customer, billing id, terms, and notes.
>
> Will Gnucash not create an invoice id without me having to remember what the
> last one I used was?

Yes and no.  Gnucash will choose and InvoiceID automatically if you leave
the entry blank.  But if you do NOT leave it blank, then no, it wont remember
your last one for you.

> When I try to go to my customer list, instead of a list of customers 
> to choose
> from, I have to search for each customer by name, which is both slow and a
> real pain. But even when I do that, I still don't see any place to enter a
> dollar amount that I want to invoice for. Instead I get a window that allows
> me to view an invoice, but I haven't created one yet and there doesn't seem
> to be any way to create one!

Right, there is no "Create New Invoice" from the "Find Customer" dialog.
Yes, the searching is a little annoying.  But I wouldn't call it "slow"..
The Query itself is quick.  However the interface is a little more complex
than it needs to be.

>> So, if you want to use SX you cannot use the business features..
>
> What is SX?  is this the scheduler? Surely there must be some way I can
> schedule a transaction for each account I want to bill every month so that
> this doesn't have to be done manually - it's a show stopper for me.

See the FAQ <http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/FAQ>
SX == Scheduled Transaction.
And no, you cannot schedule invoices or payments-to-invoices.
Sorry if it's a showstopper for you, but it's where we are.
feel free to donate code if it's that important to you.

> I'm sorry if I seem to be asking basic questions, but I still haven't been
> able to get Gnucash docs to install, and even though I've printed off the
> html version on the gnucash website, I can't find anything that walks me
> through how to do this.

What Distro?  Try:

  apt-get install gnucash-docs
or
  yum install gnucash-docs
or
  ....

> Thanks, Bob

-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