Reporting positive and negative customer balances separately.

[Derek Atkins]

Buddha Buck <blaisepascal at gmail.com> writes:

> On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Robert Smits <bob at rsmits.ca> wrote:
>
>> > > Is there a way to customize the balance sheet report so it'll split out
>> > > A/R into the two types of account balances?
>> >
>> > Have you tried the Customer Aging report?
>> >
>> > > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>> > > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>> >
>> > -derek
>>
>> What is the Customer Aging Report, and where do I find it?
>
>
> This reminds me, I never answered Derek's question...
>
> For your question, the Customer Aging Report is available (I assume) under
> Reports->Business->Receivable Aging Report.

Yes, sorry, it's labeled Receivable Aging.  Sorry.

> It provides a listing of all customers, their current balance, and how much
> they have outstanding from invoices over different time periods -- how much
> they owe from 0-30 days, from 31-60 days, from 61-90 days, and over 90
> days.  The report also contains links to each customer and to their current
> customer report.  It looks like a good report for working within GnuCash,
> not necessarily intended to be printed out (and certainly not distributed
> outside your organization).
>
> To answer Derek's question:
>
> Yes, assuming that the Customer Aging report is the same as the Receivable
> Aging report, I have tried it.
>
> It doesn't do quite what I wanted, although it (theoretically) has the
> information I need if I'm willing to massage it by hand.  What I was hoping
> for was a way to easily say that there are $800 in prepaid invoices and
> $600 in outstanding unpaid invoices, giving an A/R balance of -$200.  With
> the Aging report, I can get this data by adding up the positive and
> negative total values separately.

There is no report that will give you that information *AND* correlate
it per customer.  If you want the totals like this just run an Account
Report on the A/R account.

> Or I think I could.  I'm uncertain what settings I have to make in order to
> do that.  By default, I only get a portion of the customers.  My first
> thought was that it only included customers who had unpaid invoices, but I
> see one customer with a negative balance, and one customer with a zero
> balance, so it's not just folks with unpaid invoices.  When I select the
> option "Show zero balance items", I seem to get all our customers, both
> those who have paid ahead and those who haven't (as well those with zero
> balances).  The total shown at the bottom of the page does not match the
>  A/R balance on the balance sheet for the same time (it's off by $20).
>
> It's possible I'm asking too much of the report, or I just don't understand
> it, but until I know it's limitations I'm not going to trust it.

You are.  :)

> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available