Coop Finances

[Stella-Terra Clemens]

Hello.
My name is Stella-Terra and I'm the finance coordinator for a small (~25
member) housing cooperative.  Right now we're using Quickbooks, but I'm
trying to make the case to switch to GNUCash, as I've enjoyed it so much for
my personal finances and stand behind any free software/open source
endeavor.
As a demonstration I decided to start the books and model the last two
months of account activity in GNUCash.  Unfortunately, I've run into a spot
of trouble:
Every month on the 25th, the house charges each of it's members their rent
fee.  I can't figure out how to model this.  Essentially this is a landlord
tenant situation.  I want to be able to have one account per member (as
income accounts, I guess) and then have an account that houses their debt
(which I'm assuming is an asset) but then when they pay the house, it has to
go into the checking account, so the debt keeps going up.  I'm confused
about how to properly model this relationship.
I tried to use the business functionality with the invoices, treating the
members as customers, but it seems too complicated, and I wasn't able to
figure out how to look at the situation from the accounts.

Anyway, thanks very much.
Stella-Terra

[Side request: is there a way to have the same amounts billed to the members
every month?]