Payables Aging and Receivables Aging reports

[Graham Stoddart-Stones]

Maf: 


Thank you for this. You may have touched upon the root of the issue - in that the designers and the users have different approaches to the question. Although the total A/R or A/P is a crucial number for business, the individual accounts and dates are more important to me for Cash Flow calculations - when do I need to pay whom? As I explained in my earlier email, this is a piece of cake with the sub-account system, and is immediately very visual on screen. I assume that the same would be the case with an aging report, but it represents an extra step - one has to run the report each time. 


It never occurred to me to set the system up in any other way, particularly as the system totals so cleanly into the parent accounts - one feels it must have been designed this way! In fact, we have been running Gnucash since 2009, and have never once had to run the A/R and A/P aging, because the sub-account system worked so well. So we had no inkling that it was not designed this way until we were asked to run Aging accounts by a consultant - which was when we discovered that the reports produced zero outputs. 


I looked through the archive of the mailing list before writing the first email querying this, and could not find any prior reports of this issue - so it looks as if this is an incident localised to me, and the way that I set the system up. <sigh!> There is just no fun in being creative any more! I will have to ponder whether to adjust the accounts to "how they should have been from the start"! 


Thank you 


Graham 


Graham 
----- Original Message -----

From: "Maf. King" <maf at chilwell.net> 
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org 
Cc: "Graham Stoddart-Stones" <gstones at pacifera.com>, "Derek Atkins" <warlord at mit.edu> 
Sent: Tuesday, 19 June, 2012 6:57:07 AM 
Subject: Re: Payables Aging and Receivables Aging reports 

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.