Crediting a customer

[Dave Williams]

On 10:30, Tue 21 Jul 09, Dave Williams wrote:
> On 21:52, Mon 27 Oct 08, Andrew Ruscica wrote:
> > I have addressed this by actually creating a new invoice for the customer.
> > The invoice number is CREDIT-### where ### is my cheque number. And the
> > account for the transaction is my chequing account.
> > _______________________________________________
> How did you actually do this? Given all invoices generate a inflow of
> funds I cant select any account that reduces the net business asset.
> 
> I have a business where customers pay up front for expected services and
> then get a refund at the end of the period for any services not used. 
> The customer may decide they really want the money or can leave their
> account in credit. Is there any other way of doing this? There original
> invoice has long since been paid so I dont want to edit that.
> _______________________________________________

I now have another credit note problem. My business consumes electricity and
I pay bills as they arrive. For the last few months I have been invoiced
and mostly paid on estimated usage. Now I receive a bill for this month which
is based on actual usage and it turns out I have been using less
electricity than expected to the extent that this bill is negative -
i.e. a credit note. 

In practice I could leave the bill and use it to offset future bills but
I want to post it into A/P to be consistent with all the other bills I
have. Otherwise I cant run a vendor report to find it later on as a
physical bill.

Equally if I leave it but use it as a line item in a subsequent bill I
will lose the reference to the billing ID as you can only really have one
and there is a risk I dont deal with the paperwork and it gets lost.

Furthermore if I request a refund cheque from the supplier there is no
clear way I appear to be able to handle it. Again consistency is a key
requirement for me to make the reports work.

I could add the vendor as a customer and treat the negative bill as an
A/R entry but this soon degenerates into having all vendors and
customers mixed up and leads to having to run vendor and customer
reports and try to merge them.

We MUST get this feature implemented properly and soon - Its imperative in
business today (for ease of use if nothing else). 

Its now becoming a show stopper for me. Having used Gnucash for personal
finances ever since it introduced automated transactions I would hate to
have to ditch it for my business needs as there are very few viable
alternatives in the Linux world.