gnucash 2.4.x does wonderful stuff! (AKA billing GUI's)

Shane Litherland litherland-farm at bigpond.com
Thu Aug 11 18:29:40 EDT 2011


Hi again all;

well, now that i've ironed out some preliminaries and got back to using
gnucash after moving up to 2.4, I must say I've found some wonderful
additions and/or tweaks of things :-)

particularly, with invoicing / bills; entering the vendor details for a
bill is more intuitive now, I can start typing the name in the field and
up come options! saves several clicks going to the select... option :-)

then, when I get to a bill, and start entering an expense line, gnucash
remembers similar items, and not only auto-fills the description, but
even goes so far as to have a shot at what expense account I'll be
posting it to... wonderful! less typing again!

Then, to pay the bill, I've got a handy icon at the top of the page to
cut straight to payment window; this window is a bit more schmick than
previously too :-)

I guess though, I can't let it all be roses and strawberry sponge
cake... here's where I might be veering from 'users' to 'devs', feel
free to wrap my knuckles if I have...

I was doing a bill for bank fees, which are exempt from tax (GST) for
Australia. In the 2.2.x I'd set the preferences for the bank vendor's
details to be no tax, and no tax table, so when entering items in a
bill, the check-boxes under 'taxable' and 'tax included' stayed blank,
just to save me a couple of mouse clicks (and remove user error if I
forgot said clicks). Having just done a bill in the 2.4.x it appears not
to recognise the 'not taxable' preferences, as the 'taxable' field still
has a check in it for each new line item.
Or have I missed something basic again... I did try re-selecting the
preferences for that vendor just to eliminate one possibility. I haven't
tried doing another bill since changing those prefs and re-starting
gnucash, as I don't yet have another bill to put into the system (which,
in many ways, is a good thing ;-) ). So dunno if re-selecting the prefs
for that vendor may have been recognised on re-start.
But I did try with another vendor that was set on 'global' for tax;
after changing the tax option to 'yes' and selecting a tax table, new
entries on the bill showed both fields checked, so it seems gnucash
could refresh itself in that direction (check more boxes), but not the
other (blank both boxes).

a second thing that showed up amidst my enthralment with generating a
new bill, was that after selecting a vendor, I could start typing a job
name in the text box, and it would list matching jobs. However, it
seemed to list all possible matches regardless of vendor. For example, I
have 'service station x' with a job of 'fuel'. I also have 'service
station, a, b, y, q' also with jobs of 'fuel'. Now, I would be happy to
have one job 'fuel' that all the service stations 'shared' (essentially
a similar result to posting all those fuel bills to one expense
account), but at least when using 2.2.x gnucash wanted a job to match
with a vendor, which I can understand has benefits in reporting,
chargeback etc (my farm business isn't fancy enough to benefit from
those extra gnucash facilities though). but I digress...
So, the 'job' field seems to list any job like 'fuel' when I start
typing fuel. If I go to 'select' and use the search box, it will only
find the match relating to that vendor (which is what I'm choosing at
the moment). I don't know if the 'type and pick-a-match' option would
cause internal issues if I picked a 'fuel' job that was from another
vendor, I'm not brave enough to try that.. The list of matches doesn't
show job number or vendor details to allow me to pick the right match.
When I found this 'type-and-pick' facility I expected the options in the
job to be 'filtered' by vendor, similar to what the 'search' process
does.

whilst on the subject of 'remembering'; now gnucash remembers more info
about description/acct/amount of previous txns to a vendor, and if I do
several bills into gnucash in one sitting then the 'payment' window will
remember which account I paid the previous bill from (once i've done the
first bill), but on opening gnucash and starting with a fresh batch of
bills, it doesn't seem to remember which account I may have used to pay
the last bill from a vendor. this action seems to be the same as it was
in 2.2.x. Again, have I missed something, or is there a small tweak that
could be made in gnucash for it to remember 'payment account type'
between sessions, like it's now doing for bill
descriptions/amounts/accts etc.?

BTW, running 2.4.7 (built from rb5bdf19+ on 2011-07-06) via getdeb
repo's I think it was, on ubuntu 10.04 LTS 



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