Vendor and Customer Reports...

[Maf. King]

On Saturday 13 February 2010 01:24:49 Zed wrote:
> Using GnuCash v2.229 on LinuxMint v8.0 Helena.
>
> I have never used Vendor and/or Customer Reports before but decided to do
> so. I entered a few vendor details and then tried to generate a Vendor
> Report, without success.
>
> All I get is a message "No valid Vendor selected. Click the Options button
> to select a company."  No indication where the Options button is and it
> took me some time to realise that I had to use the right mouse button and
> click on Options.
>
> Did that, chose a Vendor and the period for which I wanted a report.  Then
> I found that I couldn't click on the button to choose the account for the
> vendor, as it was greyed out.
>
> Decided to try Customer Report - we only have one customer Sundry
> Customers. Went through the procedure by choosing the Customer and
> fortunately the account shown was Boarding Fees, where all our income goes.
> Chose the period 13/02/0/ - 13/02/10 but after clicking on Apply the Report
> shows no financial data,
>
> One question comes to mind.  Is the problem that I entered the data prior
> to entering the Vendor and Customer details?  If not, what the devil am I
> doing wrong, please?
>

It sounds to me like you haven't set up the whole business module correctly. 
Taking the customer report as a template (the vendor stuff is mostly the 
same).

1. Set some basic business info under File->Properties

2. You need an Accounts Receivable (A/R) to post your invoices to. If it 
doesn't exist, create one on the Chart Of Accounts page, generally a child of 
the Asset top-level account, and set the type to be A/R.  (this is 
Liabilities:Accounts Payable for vendors) - If you have an A/R account, make 
sure that the Type is correctly set!

3. Create the customer (you may already have done this).

4. Create a new customer invoice (Business -> Customer -> New Invoice) and 
Post It to your A/R account.

5. Run the customer report. Note that the Options Button is on the toolbar in 
my version of GC, towards the right, betwen "export" and "print", select the 
customer and the A/R account.

HTH,
Maf.