Why must invoices have > $0.00 value?

Derek Atkins warlord at MIT.EDU
Fri Feb 20 12:43:34 EST 2009


Hi,

Quoting Marc Evans <marc at softwarehackery.com>:

> Hello,
>
> I am trying to understand what the limitation is in the system that
> makes it necessary to require that invoices have a > $0.00 value? I ask
> mainly because I would like to use negative values for debit memos. As I
> look through the system I am not seeing an obvious reason for the
> limitation, and am considering removing it. Can anyone speak to this?

I'm going to answer this question as if it were asked on the -devel list.
It's been answered before, and discussed a few times.  The invoice
and payment systems make assumptions that an Invoice is "positive"
and a payment is "negative".  It works very hard to make sure that
you only have one invoice per lot, but you can have multiple payments
per lot and multiple lots per payment.  But the way it determines
whether a posted transaction is an invoice or a payment is whether it's
positive or negative.

With negative invoices it voilated these assumptions and caused some
lot<->transaction failures.

You're welcome to make the changes locally yourself but then you're
likely to hit problems.  This limitation was put in specifically
because of issues with negative invoices.  Go look at the changelog
and the associated bugzilla report for more information.

> - Marc

-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



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