Process payments

Keith A. Milner maillist at superlative.org
Mon Jun 27 16:21:25 EDT 2011


On Monday 27 Jun 2011 16:39:48 Keith Clark wrote:
> How would I process a payment on an invoice with another Account
> Receivable account?  My customer is paying an invoice with a debit card,
> which is another accounts receivable account.
> 
> I try with the Business>Customer>Process payment, but it will not allow
> me to select another a/r account to pay it with.

It sound to me like you have some accounting concepts muddled here. Normally 
you would normally have a single Accounts Receiveable account. You wouldn't 
normally separate Accounts Receiveable out to deal with different payments 
methods, etc.

I'm not an Accountant, but I'll try to explain it in simple terms that I 
understand. No doubt I will get soemthing wrong and someone more knowledgable 
will correct me.

The Accounts Receiveable account is there as a kind of "catch-all" for 
everything which is owed to you (The Accounts Payable is the same but for 
everything you owe.

When you posted the Invoice, this created entries in the Accounts Receiveable 
account. At this point, you are owed money and the A/R Account should reflect 
this. This should be irrellevent of payment or pretty much anything else.

It is entirely possible (if unusual) to have multiple A/R accounts but, in the 
case you do have more than one, the one to be used for that invoice is chosen 
at the time you post the invoice. From this point all transactions associated 
with that invoice should go to that A/R account. You cannot post a payment to 
a different account. It doesn't make sense to.

If you want to track payments from different methods, you need to track this in 
some other way, such as putting "Paid by Credit card" in the memo field when 
you post the payment in Gnucash.

I can't see any major reason why you would need to separately account for 
payments by different methods. If you really do need to for some reason (like 
to reconcile with a Credit Card Merchant Account, I suspect the best way to do 
this is to have a separate Bank account set up for the Merchant account, make 
the payment as normal, but to this Merchant Account, and then transfer the 
amount from the Merchant Account to the normal Bank Account.

I hope this make sense.

Cheers,


-- 
Keith A. Milner


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