Linking between invoice/bill and payments

[Geert Janssens]

Invoices/bills are linked to payments. GnuCash tracks invoice/payment links in lots. You can 
look at these lots by opening an A/R or A/P account and open the lot viewer.

In the rest of the explanation, I'll only talk about invoices/customers to simplify but all that I 
write is equally valid for bills/vendors.

Payments are applied on a first in - first out basis. So when you process a payment, it will apply 
it to the oldest open invoice first, and if the payment amount was larger than the unpaid 
amount of that invoice, the remainder of the payment is applied to the second oldest invoice 
and so on.
This is only different if an invoice was explicitly selected in the payment dialog: in that case this 
invoice is prepended to the fifo queue so that any payment will first be applied to this invoice 
and the remainder to the rest of the fifo queue.
There are a few ways the invoice becomes explicitly set in the payment dialog
- you click on the payment button on an invoice page
- you click the pay invoice button in the bills due reminder window when you selected a bill
- you select an invoice in the invoice search dialog and then click on the payment button
- in the payment dialog you enter an invoice yourself

Finally, this is how it works in GnuCash 2.4. In the future 2.6 version, this will be slightly 
different. The new payment dialog will give you more freedom to choose how payments are 
applied. For example you can select multiple invoice to apply a payment to. The new payment 
dialog still needs some minor tweaks to properly deal with some corner cases though. That 
should be ready when 2.6 will be released.

Geert


On Thursday 27 June 2013 14:05:07 David Cousens wrote:
> If I process a payment for a bill in Gnucash using the  Process
> Payment icon or menu item, is the payment made/received linked to the
> bill/invoice  which is displayed at the time or are payments totally
> independent of invoices and bills?
>  I.e.  Is there a link or pointer internal to Gnucash between the
> payment and  the bill or invoice it is for  (or only any linking we
> provide in the memo and description fields) and any flagging that a 
> particular invoice/bill has been paid?
> 
> David Cousens
> 
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