how to find when an invoice is paid, and to which account
Geert Janssens
janssens-geert at telenet.be
Mon Oct 31 04:07:52 EDT 2011
On maandag 31 oktober 2011, Yu Liansu wrote:
> Hello.
>
> New user of gnucash. I found an invoice our customer should pay is
> marked as "paid". It could be my memory is wrong, but how do I check? I
> need to know when the invoice is paid (invoice post date is irrelevant)
> and to which account. I checked both my Saving Account and Checking
> Account and not seeing any entry with the same amount as the invoice,
> but there are thousands entries that I could missed something.
>
> So do you have a sure way to find the payment transaction of a paid
> invoice?
>
> Thanks in advance!
There is presently no easy way to determine which payment belongs to which
invoice. The reason is that GnuCash doesn't really have the concept of paying
an invoice, but rather you pay a customer. Payments will be assigned to
invoices in a first-in-first-out order. When you select an invoice in the
payment dialog, it will be put in front of the fifo. Overpayments are
automatically forwarded to the next invoice already in the fifo, or if there
are no other invoices available, it will be automatically assigned to the
first invoice you will enter in the future. This is called automatic payment
forward.
That's the basic mechanism. Now here are some tools you can use to help you
figure out what is happening:
1. Open a Customer Report (Reports - Business - Customer Report)
This will give you an overview of all invoices and payments for a given
customer. Check if everything looks as expected there. If there was an
overpayment or a payment to the wrong invoice, you will probably discover it
here. Unfortunately, this overview doesn't show the payment's account in the
2.4 series. In the unstable development series, I recently changed this so
that each payment has a link to its split in the proper account register. So
if you can't figure it out on the current 2.4 stable release, you could try to
install the unstable development snapshot, with the clear warning that it's an
unstable branch and may destroy your data (so only use it on a copy of your
data).
2. Secondly, you can open a register for A/R account to which you posted the
invoice. This account will contain a split for each invoice and payment made.
You could filter on your customer's name to shorten the list of splits if you
like. In this account you can also check whether your payments match your
invoices, and you can easily discover automatic payment forwards.
3. If that's still not clear, you can open the lot viewer on your A/R account
to discover exactly which payment was assigned to your invoice. It's also the
most difficult tool to use, because it exposes the internal data format to
match payments to invoices (this data format is called a lot). You will have
to find the lot matching your invoice in the long list of lots and check the
details for that lot, in the bottom half of the window (you may have to move
the divider up before you see the bottom part of the window).
Hopefully this information can help you.
Geert
More information about the gnucash-user
mailing list