Unposting and changing paid invoices

[Axel Essbaum]

On Jun 6, 2012, at 11:51, Geert Janssens wrote:

> On 06-06-12 11:19, Axel Essbaum wrote:
>> On Jun 5, 2012, at 20:04, Geert Janssens wrote:
>>> If the invoice amount stays the same, you can safely do this.
>> Excellent, thanks Geert!
>> 
>> Out of curiosity, what breaks if I make a mistake on the invoice amount?
> I'm not sure you would really break things, but you could get some confusing side effects if you repost an invoice with an amount lower than the amount that was paid for the invoice.
> 
> Basically, if you unpost the invoice, accidentally lower the amount of the invoice and repost it again, GnuCash will note that the payment it still has open is more than the invoice and it will create an automatic payment forward entry in your A/R account. This automatic payment forward will be used to (partly) pay the next invoice that gets posted. Since you will be modifying a whole series of invoices, making this mistake early on would cause a propagation of automatic payment forwards, because the first automatic payment forward created would then be used for the next invoice you repost. However, there was already a correct payment for this invoice. So now this payment will be split again in a part to completely pay the remainder of the invoice (total minus payment forward) and the remainder will become another automatic payment forward.
> 
> In the end if you fix your wrong invoice and apply the last remaining automatic payment forward to that invoice, your balance should be correct. I'm not too fond of this fix though, because I like to match payments with invoices and not with customers. So personally if I ran into such a situation, to fix it I would remove all automatic payment forwards and probably also all payments linked to the affected invoices and then I would re-enter those payments per invoice. But I generally try to avoid getting in such a situation in the first place ;)

Ok, thanks for the info Geert.  I'm hoping to avoid any mistakes, but if I do enter something wrong I now know what to look for.

- Axel

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Axel Essbaum
axel at essbaum.com