invoice date vs bank transaction date

[R. Victor Klassen]

Your problem only exists if you import your transactions directly from the bank, with no other intervention steps.

In particular, GNUCash insists on using accrual accounting if you create invoices (for payments due you) and bills (for payments you owe).  In such a case, the invoice/bill normally includes lines that apply the individual line items to their appropriate income/expense accounts and balances them with entries in Accounts Receivable/Payable.   

If you have these invoices/bills in place at the time that you get the transactions from the bank, the bank items would get applied against Accounts Receivable (if you received funds) or Payable (if you paid them).

Ideally, they will get matched as payments with the corresponding invoices or bills, but in my experience that is somewhat hit and miss.  Not sure why.

If you don’t have the invoices/bills in place at the time, you can still create them at a later time - but to make it all work, the transactions where money changes hands should involve the bank account and accounts receivable/payable.  When you go to create the invoices or bills later, set the Post Date (in the dialogue where you post the invoice or bill) to the date of the transaction - when it should accrue - and your reports should work correctly for accrual accounting.


On Dec 23, 2013, at 4:10 PM, Parker Jones <zoubidoo at hotmail.com> wrote:

>> 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
> 		 	   		  
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