Vendor & customer same person

[Maf. King]

On Sat 26 April 14 23:33:16 tsagar wrote:
> Dear Michael,
> 
> I hope this mail does not come as a blast from the past.
> 
> You posted your method of dealing with one entity that's a vendor as well as
> a customer - in 2009. You indicated that a clearing account would provide a
> workaround. Also, it's highly likely that over the last five years, GNUCash
> itself has undergone considerable change.
> 
> Here's my question:
> 
> In my business (trading in light emitting diodes), almost all customers are
> also vendors. We supply LED light sources to organisations that assemble LED
> lights. Very regularly, when a particular type of light source is in short
> supply, we call up one of our other customers and buy back some of that
> kind to supply to another customer. Now, creating a clearing account for
> each customer / vendor can result in a lot of issues. Also, I would like to
> generate account statements that contain all transactions with an entity.
> If I have to have one vendor and one customer account for the same entity,
> I'll need to generate two reports and merge them painfully in a manual way.
> 
> I wonder whether there's a better way of managing this. Some commercial
> accounting packages have a system where you register an entity and not a
> customer or a vendor. Then, you simply flag the entity as a customer or a
> vendor or an employee or an agent etc. Would something like this be doable
> in GNUCash?
> 
> I am aware that answering complex questions like this do require a lot of
> thinking and time. I would like to thank you in advance for such time spent
> by you on what is essentially a gratuitous pursuit (although it could be
> immensely beneficial for me).
> 

Hi,

The most recent versions (the 2.6 series) of Gnucash have introduced support 
for Credit Notes.  Now, I have not used them yet, but it seems to me that if 
you are buying stock back from customers then it is a very similar transaction 
to customers returning stock because it is mis-ordered or whatever.

I don't know about how you actually operate the "buy-back" scenario, but would 
suggest you have a go at the credit note approach within GC, rather than the 
intermediate account idea, which as you say, probably won't scale well..

Sell customer A 1000 units - raise an invoice 
Buy back 100 units from A  - raise a credit note
Sell 100 to customer B and invoice....

Worth a trial to see if it possible?

HTH,
Maf.