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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