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

[Geert Janssens]

On vrijdag 12 augustus 2011, Shane Litherland wrote:
> 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 :-)
> 
Hi,

I'm glad you like these improvements.

<snip>

> 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.
Indeed, this seems to b work no longer. Can you file a bug report in bugzilla 
for this please ?

<snip>
> 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.
> 
This was never taken in account when the autofill was added. The primary 
concern was to make the vendor/customer easier to select. But your suggestion 
would be another good improvement IMO, so I'd ask you to create an enhancement 
request for this in bugzilla.

> 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.?
I can't reproduce this issue. My business book still remembers the account 
last used for paying a bill. Even across GnuCash restarts.
What are you using to store your data in ? The traditional xml files, sqlite 
files or a database ?

Geert