Expanding Customer records

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Bob Brush 3 <bobbrush3 at gmail.com> writes:

> On Mon, 2014-03-31 at 17:58 +1030, Len in Kapunda wrote:
>> Hi, I have one or two questions, that I have not found answers for in 
>> the Tutorial nor the other places I have looked.
>> 
>> I am running GC 2.6.2 on Win8, on a Toshiba Laptop.
>> 
>>  1. I would liketo use GC for a club with about 70 members.  I would
>>     like to add some extra fields to the Customer record, eg date of
>>     joining; type of member (three types); and some other internal
>>     things.  Is this easy to do?
>>  2. When importing from a CSV spreadsheet, how does one align the fields?
>>  3. I am slowly working through how to send out their invoices for
>>     membership, but that is not urgent just now.
>> 
>> I welcome any input to my issues.
>> 
>> Len in Kapunda
>
> I think programming might be a lot of work, as you would have to change
> the internals and also create an interface to interact with the new
> info.
>
> My recommendation, and there may be better, would be to create an
> invoice for the customer with the date, line item date, and post date
> being equal to the date of joining, make the first line of the invoice
> and the invoice memo "Joined 3/31/14" or similar, and record it as a $0
> invoice.  Later when you run a report you will know everyone's first $0
> invoice is when they joined and the invoice memo will usually show on
> the report also.
>
> I would probably just put the member type in the notes field of the
> customer, but you could be more complicated if you want, for instance
> you could create Income:A Members, Income:B Members, Income:C Members
> allowing you to split out sales reports on each, but it will make data
> entry more cumbersome forever.. :)  
>
> Another way you could hack gnucash would be to use one of the name
> fields, you could prefix each customer with a membership type like this
> "Premier Member Jones, Rob & Anna" it would sort the customers by
> membership type first, you could still search by name, but it might make
> entering new invoices a bit cumbersome by having to always type the
> prefix.  
>
> You could also list it in the name field, I think this field is optional
> anyway, and if you put "Smith, John" as the company field and the name
> field it just prints twice on the invoice.  You could also use one of
> the address lines.  
>
> Although I will warn that when you color outside the lines you might not
> anticipate the future, when we were using quickbooks we had this kind of
> issue, so we started using the last line of the address field for cell
> phone numbers, it was kind of nice as it printed out this way, but later
> when the actual fields were added, we had old names one way and new
> names in a different way, made for a lot of fun
>
> We find the notes field on invoices and bills to be the most helpful way
> to store any information outside the normal options.  You can record
> summary of discussions, samples borrowed, important dates, just about
> anything.
>
> -Bob

The underlying data structures are not easily extensible in this way,
and certainly not from a user.  Any kind of changes would definitely
require coding changes and rebuilding the app.  There *is* some storage
space (called a KVP) where you could add said ancillary data, but I'd
first ask if this is the right place for your information.

For example, could you use some existing entries (like some otherwise
unused address entries)?

Good Luck,

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-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