Cash versus Accrual Accounting

[John Morris]

Hi Mike, Mark and John,
  Thanks for replying to my plea for help. Ideally, I would like to avoid running two sets of books or accounts. The extra work of entering the data twice eliminates the advantage of moving to GnuCash. We already have a marginally workable system that tracks the invoices separate from the books.

  I would also like to avoid unposting invoices and reposting them after the year because that will mess with when they show up in the weekly amounts billed. That information is much more important to us on a daily basis than the tax information, which is only needed when I fill out the tax forms. However, given that the weekly amounts billed report only looks back four weeks, I could simply do that unposting and reposting after February 1, except that many of the invoices that were not paid as of January 1 would then be paid by then. Unposting and reposting a paid invoice is more involved, so I think I would like to avoid that.

  So, unless I hear another great idea from someone else, I think I will end up recording a single transaction in the income category removing the sum total of unpaid invoices on the last day of the year. I will then record another transaction the following day restoring those totals. That way, when I run the reports for the taxes a few months later, the summary will show the amount paid that year, not the amount billed.


  For what it's worth, because I don't see the "business" features of GnuCash as separate from the "accounting" features, GnuCash cannot "support" cash accounting in my eyes if the "business" features do not support it. Others are, of course, free to choose a different way to use the language, but that is what I mean when I say that GnuCash does not support cash accounting.

Best,
John