Accounts receivable

[Geert Janssens]

On 01-06-12 19:51, Dean Gibson wrote:
> On 2012-06-01 10:35, Derek Atkins wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> ...
>>
>> Rule #1 of the business features: Thou shalt not use the Business 
>> Accounts
>> (A/R and A/P) for manual entry.
>>
>>> ....
>>
>> -derek
>>
>
> Rule #2 should be:  Allow for corrections when importing a large 
> number of transactions from QuickBooks (as I did). (grin)
>
> Rule #3 should be:  When I reconcile a credit card account and have 
> GnuCash generate an A/R transaction, it should not place a "?" in the 
> type field if it knows it's an invoice. (another grin)
>
> Related question:  So, using the A/R feature, when I make a payment 
> and the transaction is entered via the online banking feature, how do 
> I make an entry to the A/R register?
> I'm just having the payment transaction post directly to the A/R 
> register.
>
That's not possible in the current GnuCash release. The online banking 
and the business features (which depend on A/R to be used in particular 
ways) don't talk to each other, so even in you post the payment 
transaction directly into the A/R register, the business features will 
just ignore it.
The only workaround I know of is using an intermediary account (perhaps 
of type liability) where you post your (online) payments to and then use 
the Business menu options to mark your invoices as paid against that 
account.

In the development version of GnuCash there is a slight improvement: 
there you can select any transaction in your bank account register and 
transform it into a payment for a particular owner or invoice. So in 
this case you would import your online transactions and then manually 
iterate through your bank account to mark payments as such. Still not 
optimal, but a first step in the right direction.
> -- Dean
>
> ps:  Thanks for the reply.  However, QuickBooks did allow for 
> corrections to A/R invoices.  People always make mistakes, and locking 
> the transaction for corrections seems to me to be counter-intuitive.  
> If I can't edit the A/R transaction directly, there should be SOME way 
> to fix errors.
I'm not sure, but I believe GnuCash doesn't know how to import business 
related information (invoices, customers, vendors,...) from quickbooks 
or other accounting systems. As far as I am aware, it can only import 
basic transactions, without any additional business metadata involved. 
So in my opition, you should not use A/R accounts for your import from 
Quickbooks. It will only be in the way when you later intend to create 
invoices via the Business features. You could check out the business 
importer tool (not built by default), that does allow to import invoices 
from csv files. Maybe that can help ?

Geert