Payables Aging and Receivables Aging reports

[Maf. King]

On Tue 19 June 12 05:55:57 Graham Stoddart-Stones wrote:
> Derek:
> 
> 
> Interesting thought from you! It never occurred to me to set up our A/R and
> A/P in any other way, and I must have missed any documentation that says
> that all A/R and A/P have to be in one account. I find it hugely helpful to
> just be able to look at A/R and A/P and see immediately the state of every
> account - which is what happens with the sub-accounts that we have set up -
> and they do total very nicely into the parent accounts. I presume that if I
> roll them all up into the parent account, then one can only see the state
> of each account by running the report (ie one extra step!)?
> 
> 
> It leads me to question why Options offers multiple choices of account
> selections for these reports, please? - ie there is a very helpful error
> message that pops up to instruct us to select the account on which to run
> the report, and the drop-down selection of choices includes all the
> sub-accounts in either A/R or A/P as appropriate - which suggests that the
> designers certainly had in mind the possibility of someone setting up
> sub-accounts (although admittedly, the system ignores the selection when
> one makes it!)
> 
> 
> Looking forward to your thoughts

Hi Graham.

Derek is the (lead) designer of the business gubbins in GC, so he can surely 
answer about intentions for reports etc!  I suspect that the account-selection 
dialogue just re-uses the generic account selection logic/code/widget, which 
may be a bug? (in the loosest sense of the word!)

My thought on the set-up method (not sure that the docs explicitly say to only 
use one A/P, but I think it is implied at least) is to think of it like this:- 
would you sub-divide a credit card account by payee?  

The A/P account is just a way to keep track of "I owe this total sum of money 
to others, and I have to pay it soon (eg. 30 days etc.) "  Expense accounts 
are for tracking the items/categories of stuff you buy, and the "vendors" 
keeps track of exactly how much you owe and to whom (and how soon!).

By analogy, the credit card lets you know how much you have spent using a 
card, but not exactly where than money came went - that detail is in the 
expense accounts that you transferred from...

HTH,
Maf.