Crediting a customer

[Des Dougan]

Dave,

On 22 Jul 2009, at 15:14, Dave Williams wrote:

> 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.
>


If you're asking how to credit an account using the business  
functions, then it is possible, in a two-stage process. If you search  
back through the archives for about 6 to 8 weeks ago, there is a  
thread where I asked that question, and received help on making the  
credit work. I tested it and it works fine. Not by any means perfect,  
but it does work.

Des

--

Des Dougan
Principal
Dougan Consulting Group Inc.

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