invoice date vs bank transaction date

[Parker Jones]

> From: warlord at MIT.EDU
> Parker Jones <zoubidoo at hotmail.com> writes:
> 
> > I am preparing annual accounts by importing transactions from a bank
> > account via qif.  A problem that keeps cropping up is that an invoice
> > that falls within the accounting period has a transaction date outside
> > the accounting period.  For tax purposes, the important date (tax
> > point) is the invoice date and not the transaction date.
> >
> > Is there a way of controlling which accounting period a transaction
> > falls in?  I'd be interested to hear how others handle this.
> 
> Presuming you are just importing the transactions via qif (and not
> importing the actual Invoices via the Invoice Importer) then no, sorry.
> The date is the only control.  If you want it to appear in a different
> period then you need to change the date of the transaction.

Thank you for your reply Derek.  

Changing the transaction date is not a clean option as it would knock all the running balances on the bank account out and make reconciling difficult.

I'm a bit surprised this isn't possible as it's a key element of accrual accounting.

The cash method of accounting: only record when you receive cash or pay cash out.
vs
The accrual method of accounting: records income items when they are earned and records deductions when expenses are incurred.

When importing transactions from a bank account the dates are all payment dates, not invoice dates.  If Gnucash doesn't not make it possible to annotate the transaction with a second date representing an invoice date or tax point, it seems it's not possible to do accrual accounting.

This was actually explained pretty well by yourself 10 years ago!
http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2003-May/009125.html
See also http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Cash_Based_Accounting

P.Jones