Accounts payable

[Dean Gibson]

I'm replying to this "closed" issue (to me) because I've seen other 
threads that have similar misunderstandings that I had.

Basically, the problem is that in QuickBooks, when you reconcile a 
credit card account, in the post-reconciliation process you have the 
option of creating a bill (in the A/P register) at the end of the 
reconciliation.  Just like in GnuCash, you don't then edit bills; you 
just pay them.

What's different in GnuCash is that the post-reconciliation process does 
NOT create a bill;  it just creates another transaction. Similarly, when 
importing (eg, online bank transaction) a payment in GnuCash, there does 
not appear to be a way to attach the imported transaction to a bill payment.

All this is very well if one understands this, and creates a regular 
"Liability" account named "Accounts Payable" (or whatever), as I did.  
However, given the popularity of QuickBooks (and the subsequent desired 
to be free of it), it might be nice to have a Wiki page or other 
documentation that explains this (and any other) accounting procedure 
difference between QuickBooks and GnuCash, written by someone more 
knowledgeable than I.  It also might be helpful to modify the GnuCash 
post-reconciliation window to prevent posting to an A/P account (either 
that, or create a proper A/P bill).

-- Dean

Message history [edited]:

On 2012-06-04 07:12, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Dean Gibson <gnucash at ultimeth.com> writes:
>> I imported "bills" (QuickBooks terminology) transactions ...) into a GnuCash account and marked it as an A/P-type account.  Those transactions in GnuCash look EXACTLY like (eg, the "type" field contains "?") the ones that are created when I reconcile a credit card ("CC) account in GnuCash, and then use the resultant screen that posts the reconciled amount to that "A/P" account.  This is the same procedure that I used in QuickBooks.
> Again, don't use an A/P account unless you're using Vendor Bills (and the associated Process Payment).
>
>> Am I doing something wrong?  Should I not be posting CC reconciliations to an A/P account?
> No, you should not.
>
>> For CC reconciliations, do I have to go back and re-reconcile the CC account?
> I don't understand why you would have to do that...  You can just point the transaction at another account instead of A/P -- I would recommend you point it to the bank account from which you actually PAY the credit card!  And you can safely move that transaction from the CC account.  It wont affect A/P because it's not a business transaction and therefore has no business metadata (which means it has no business being in A/P --).
>
> -derek
>