Best practice for uncashed cheques?

[Kash]

An uncashed check is a short term liability. Record each check that you 
write by going to
Business > Vendor > New Bill.
You will have to create a new vendor for each person or company that you 
write a check to.

When you want to see the total of outstanding checks, run the
Reports > Business > payable aging
report. The report will show you uncashed checks by vendor and by days 
uncashed; current, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days.

When a check is cashed, and it appears in your bank statement, pay the 
bill by going to
business > vendor > process payment
Or click through the links in the payable aging report to the vendor 
report and then to the specific bill.

If you import your bank transactions in bulk, delete the redundant 
transaction, it will not automatically link to the aging bills.

Each bill you create will be recorded in the 'accounts payable' account. 
Do not make things more complicated by creating multiple accounts 
payable accounts because it's unnecessary and will screw up reporting.

If your accounts are set up properly, and all transactions are up to 
date, the financial reality will be shown in the three basic financial 
statements; Income and Expense (or profit & loss), Balance Sheet, and 
Cash Flow. What you want to look at is the Balance Sheet, liability 
section. If you need more detail, payable aging will give you that.

Gnucash also has some limitations regarding paying multiple bills with a 
single transaction. I get around this by paying each bill separately 
rather than grouping them and paying multiple bills with one payment.

Regarding Gnucash bills, they work great, but there are some oddities. 
For instance, once you create a bill, you can unpost and edit it, but 
you  cannot completely delete it if you make a mistake. Until you're 
familiar with which user inputs cannot be edited later, save a copy of 
your Gnucash file before you enter each one, so you can restore from 
backup if you need to.


On 10/27/2012 9:12 AM, Robert Heller wrote:
> At Sat, 27 Oct 2012 11:41:43 -0400 gnucash-user at gnucash.org wrote:
>
>> How do folks handle cheques they wrote a while ago but which remain
>> uncashed for a while?
>>
>> Up until now I've been leaving them in the register with the original
>> date written on the cheque, but I'm having increasing trouble figuring
>> out where the missing money is when I go to reconcile with downloaded
>> transactions from the bank and my current balance doesn't match my
>> cleared balance.
>>
>> I've been toying with the idea of moving the dates forward for these
>> cheques to the next business day after I import/reconcile. That better
>> reflects the current reality -- those cheques could be cashed any time
>> in the future, so my current balance is correct and my future balance
>> best predicts the worst case scenario. Also, the act of finding and
>> advancing the cheques gives me a chance to chase down the person I wrote
>> them to and, if needed, gently remind them to cash my cheque.
> You probably should not alter the dates on the checks.  It is afterall
> the date you wrote on the check.
>
>> But it's a pain to do this -- is there any way to automate it?
>>
>> - Marc
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