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


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