book options, A/P use

[Shane Litherland]

Hi all,

Thought I'd throw a curve-ball on the topic of entering immediate/cash
expenses as direct transactions rather than using A/P... ;-)

When I started using Gnucash, I decided I would put every transaction
through A/P, whether it was a cash payment, EFTPOS, or bill-to-be-paid.

I knew I could have entered most, or even all, of my bills as direct
txns from cheque/cash to expense accts, but I chose to use A/P for the
following reasons:

1. There is something about internal settings associated with posting
bills which means txn entries can't be (accidentally) edited in accounts
view - a handy way to make sure I didn't stuff things up too much whilst
learning, or later on when making adjustments for taxation etc. (If I
really did want to change a bill transaction, I knew I had to open the
bill itself and do it that way).

2. The A/P process is somewhat helpful in 'automating' any generic taxes
that are applied to bills. Another boost for my peace-of-mind

3. Consistency in how and where I entered bills

4. The A/P allowed me to add biller info to Gnucash, in a way that the
txns didn't (or didn't without looking very messy). e.g. noting business
ABN, or allocating a series of bills to a particular job. After a few
years of Gnucash use though, I found I don't make as much use of that
data as I potentially could, but I come from the school-of-thought that
it's easy to put the extra data in at the start, than decide later you
need/want it and have to go over old records to input that data.

There are some down sides to using A/P like this, e.g. a bit more time
to input bills and process payment, or slight differences in dates of
post/pay because A/P is accrual-based and I'm cash-based (really only an
issue on some reports, easily adjusted for).

I think it's more a user-preference rather than do/don't. I guess, if
one considered the A/P feature of Gnucash as having to obey to the
letter the legal definition of an Account Payable, then my way may be
'wrong'. I prefer to consider Gnucash's A/P as a tool that is quite
versatile for accounting purposes, which happens to be called A/P
because that is what it was primarily designed for :-)

FWIW,
Shane.