Support Assistance

[Wm]

Wed, 31 Dec 2014 18:39:30 
<CAAyPE3A9_fkeBEJ_byxuvsqUEH7i-bd_yYUpKdWtM3ZBKQVScg at mail.gmail.com> 
Buddha Buck <blaisepascal at gmail.com>

>On Wed Dec 31 2014 at 12:25:42 PM Wm <wm+gnc at tarrcity.demon.co.uk>
>wrote:
>  Wed, 31 Dec 2014 16:05:00
>  <CAAyPE3A3ysJc7ZXqjhfz-ARGobSN0wCXbjr9-fEMTwm-UPWawQ at mail.gmail.com>
>  Buddha Buck <blaisepascal at gmail.com>
>
>  >On Wed Dec 31 2014 at 4:34:51 AM Wm 
>  >  Are you sure you mean an invoice?  Presuming there is no goods or
>  >  service that you are invoicing for, what happens if someone can't
>  or
>  >  doesn't pay?  Is there a debt on their account?
>
>  >If a church member began the year by making a pledge to make
>  monthly
>  >contributions to the church, does it create monthly invoices?
>
>  I don't know, they don't *in an accounting sense* at an org I'm
>  doing
>  some work for at the moment.  I met with the auditor a few weeks
>  back
>  and this came up.  Pledges (to use your term) are budgeted for,
>  e-mail
>  invoices (variable amounts in their case) are sent out, they are
>  chased
>  up, etc but there is no invoice in AR (they don't use gnc, yet) if
>  they
>  don't / can't pay.  All that is done in a spreadsheet, reason being
>  some
>  affiliate organisations pay more than pledged, others pay what they
>  can
>  afford at the time, etc.  What they don't do is (in an accounting
>  sense)
>  say X promised 120 a year and skipped a month and show the 10 as an
>  asset (unpaid debt) in the statutory accounts and go about writing
>  off
>  unpaid amounts when people die, etc.
>
>
>If in January X pledged 100/month for a year and died in March, I
>wouldn't send them an invoice after that, nor would I bother the estate
>for the remaining 900, either. If I had already posted an unpaid
>invoice, I probably would either (a) unpost it, or (b) "pay" it out of
>a Expenses:Miscellaneous account.

You sound like a thoroughly decent person.  My question is why did you 
create the invoice necessitating either (a) or (b) when there was 
nothing to indicate that you were owed money other than the promise ?

Is there a contract with the person and their heirs that you could 
enforce if necessary ?

>Of course, I might have a better idea
>if I talked to an accountant about it.

An accountant would probably tell you these were pro-forma invoices and 
shouldn't be accounted for in the same way that if I send you an invoice 
for GBP1million you should simply ignore it.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_forma#Invoices

and similar for some discussion.

>  >If a person signs up for an annual gym membership, payable monthly,
>  >does it create monthly invoices?
>
>  Yup.  Probably not a good example as in some cases here in the UK it
>  has
>  been ruled that not using the gym meant the person didn't have to
>  pay.
>
>I buy insurance on my car in 6-month increments, with monthly bills.
>It's a similar thing. I can cancel at any time (subject to statutory
>requirements to have insurance on any registered vehicle, and
>contractual requirements to have "comprehensive" insurance on any
>vehicle financed by my bank), and receive future bills. I'm fairly
>certain that if I paid the whole 6 month premium up front, and then
>cancelled it two months later I'd get a refund from the insurance
>company. They still invoice me monthly.

Do they really invoice you monthly?  In the UK that would normally be a 
direct debit or standing order arrangement rather than an invoice then 
payment procedure.  What the person looking after the books would do is 
notice you hadn't paid and check up on you.  They'd probably also cancel 
your insurance, so, car insurance is, again, a bad example because (in 
the UK) if you don't pay you may be uninsured at which point driving may 
become illegal.  Needless to say dead people don't drive cars.

>  >If the answers are different, why?
>
>  Because there is a (sometimes) legally enforceable contract.  If
>  someone
>  changes faith or moves to another town and attends a different
>  church do
>  they still owe what they pledged?  Can they successfully and legally
>  be
>  sued?  Is there even a contract?
>
>  It probably varies according to jurisdiction and the OP didn't say
>  where
>  they are AND is it even good PR to chase people that can't afford
>  what
>  they have pledged because of a change in circumstances, e.g. lost
>  their
>  job?
>
>That is a very good reason one of the FAQs for this list is that this
>list isn't here to give accounting advice: To find out what to do, talk
>to an accountant; to find out how to do it in GnuCash, ask here.

I'm not giving accounting advice, I'm questioning what someone is doing 
with gnc.

>The original question was if GnuCash had a shortcut to automate the
>creation of monthly invoices, not if monthly invoices were appropriate
>for the circumstances. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_who_say_Ni

>  Could recurring transactions not be used to good effect here?  It is
>  going to need to be set up one way or another and it seems to me to
>  make
>  a significant difference whether they are pro-forma invoices or not.
>
>Invoices in GnuCash tie in with the "Business Features" (customers and
>vendors" functionality, and encompass more than a simple transaction.
>They have a customer attached, they have linked payments, and they
>typically go through the A/R account, which the manual basically says
>to not use manually. It's a whole kettle of wax of functionality
>semi-bolted onto the core GnuCash functionality.

Which is why I asked if they were invoices in the first place!

> There is no scheduled
>invoice functionality.

No, but you can schedule a debt and produce an invoice based on that.

>Besides, scheduled transactions are a poor fit here, primarily for the
>same reasons you think invoices are a poor fit. What happens if you've
>scheduled a transaction of "X donates 100/month on the 5th, for one
>year", and X fails to make a donation? The transaction needs to be
>voided/reversed.

Just deleted in my case use as the promise wasn't formally accounted for 
by the production of an invoice.  Which is where we started, should 
there *be* an invoice?

>And it's hard to catch when something didn't happen.

Exactly, so don't start from there, don't produce an invoice in a 
statutory sense if there isn't a debt to collect.

>In my opinion, scheduled transactions are best for automated
>transactions:direct deposit, scheduled bill payments, automatic
>withdrawals, etc, where the date and amount of the transaction is
>clearly pre-determined and doesn't require manual handling. I wouldn't
>want to use a scheduled transaction for anything involving transferring
>funds in person or by post.

I disagree.  I see them as most useful for scheduling *incoming* 
payments / donations / contributions and noticing when they don't arrive 
so outreach can be made to people in difficulty.  You don't need the 
invoice in gnc terms except possibly post the event in this use case.

-- 
Wm...