Gnucash feature request

[John Ralls]

On Nov 3, 2010, at 1:59 AM, sagekey at yahoo.com wrote:

> Hi John
>  
> Thanks for your reply.
>  
> In order to use the aged receivables analysis, journalling makes the most sense but my original issue then remains... is there a way to journal the upload and flag it as an invoice so the aged receivable report is still available?
>  
> Can multiple users have access from different PC's at different times (i.e. not simultaneously)?
>  
> In regards to backups/exportabilty, I was thinking in order to send all details to an accountant at financial year-end - what is the best way to do this?
> 
> From: John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us>
> To: sagekey at yahoo.com
> Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Sent: Tue, November 2, 2010 8:48:04 PM
> Subject: Re: Gnucash feature request
> 
> 
> On Nov 2, 2010, at 9:08 AM, sagekey at yahoo.com wrote:
> 
> > Hi
> > 
> > Firsly, great product. Nice interface too.
> > 
> > Several requests as folllows (in order of priority):
> > 
> > 1. Would be great if there was a way to import sales journals rather than having 
> > to enter these 1 by 1 which can be quite tedious if you have numerous same or 
> > similar recurring sales each month.
> > 
> > 2. Also, with importing of purchases or general journals, is there a way to in 
> > the same row or journal split out the VAT / GST element. The idea behind this is 
> > that the journal and the VAT element thereof remain linked rather than being 
> > seen as separate entries. (Haven't seen a proper solution for VAT despite UK VAT 
> > chart of accounts (incorrect as VAT would be an asset or liability, not an 
> > expense) and some rather limited online posts)
> > 
> > 3. What about multiple users?
> > 
> > 4. What about backups / exportability of files?
> > 
> > 5. Why not have CSV imports?
> > 
> 
> Are you using the Business>Customer>Invoice function or just journalling the sales? If you're manually journalling, you could set up scheduled transactions for your recurring entries and then edit them each period to reflect whatever changes from one to the next.
> 
> Yes, if you're journalling, it's trivially easy to set up a transaction that looks something like:
> 
>     Sale of 10 Widgets to XYZ, Plc.        
>                         Accounts Payable    £500.00
>                         Income:Sales                £450.00
>                         Liabilities:Accrued VAT            £ 50.00
> 
> Gnucash doesn't support multiple simultaneous users. 
> 
> Backups are the user's responsibility. That said, Gnucash is transactional. When using a database backend, the transactional storage is delegated to the database. (Database backends are supported only in the development version.) With the XML file backend, at every save the old file is renamed with a date-time stamp and a log is created of the differences between snapshots. The number/age of these snapshot and log files is configurable in Edit>Preferences.
> 
> We do have CSV imports in the development version, and are working hard to get it released as soon as we're satisfied that it's stable.
> 

Please remember to copy your replies to the list (use reply-all or, if your mail client has it, reply-list).

No, I don't think that there's any way to enter invoices except through the dialog-box interface. 

The next version (2.4, now in development and near release) supports using a SQL database for storage, including mysql and postgresql servers. Those allow non-simultaneous access from different computers over a network.

The best (only) way to work with an accountant is to get him/her to use Gnucash. There's an external program, GnucashToQIF that could convert Gnucash XML files to QIF for import into another program, but it was based on the old 1.x schema, and it's unlikely to work at all on a current file. 

Regards,
John Ralls