Vendor & customer same person

[Geert Janssens]

On Sunday 27 April 2014 08:34:59 Maf. King wrote:
> 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.
> 
That's what I would have suggested as  well...

Geert