Invoice Payment Problem, + A/R question

[Geert Janssens]

On Saturday 08 March 2014 22:53:07 W Geoffrey O Black wrote:
> On Mar 8, 2014, at 1:51 AM, Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:
> > 
> > Lot links were introduced to allow handling of credit notes and more
> > flexible payment options. They are plainly visible because the
> > accounts payable register was never intended for direct user
> > manipulation/consultation. However you are not the first to trip
> > over them. It's on my list to try and reduce its use to a minimum.
> I understand that the A/R register is not meant for direct
> manipulation, and I am careful not to make changes when viewing it. I
> guess I had not realized it was not even meant to be consulted.
> Sometimes when I need to review a transaction and I know it was
> simple and recent, it seems more convenient to simply open Accounts
> Receivable and view it there, rather than searching for it through
> the Find Customer or Find Invoice interface. It’s not like I have any
> complaints about those interfaces—I’m just not in the habit of using
> them every time. I reckon I will quickly get in the habit of using
> them if I have to sift through “dummy” transactions to find what I’m
> looking for in the register, though. Again, if the lot links are
> serving a useful function, I don’t mind changing my workflow to
> account for their presence.
> 
> I am curious to know a bit more about the use of “lots” in GnuCash
> overall. I’m not sure I understand the term. Other than the “lot
> links,” the only direct reference to lots I have noticed as a user is
> “View Lots…” under the Actions menu. This brings up a dialog I can’t
> make much sense of (and therefore haven’t played with at all). Is
> there any documentation explaining what this is for or how to use it?
> If this is a function not intended for the average user, I will
> happily go on ignoring it, but stumbling across it (when searching
> through the menus for something else) has piqued my curiosity.
> 
> Thanks Again,
> Geoffrey

Hi Geoffey,

I can't remember answering this, so here goes.

First, GnuCash 2.6.4 will have a reworked payment logic to pick the best of the old 2.4 
behaviour and the new 2.6 behaviour. You can still select multiple invoices/credit 
notes/prepayments together in one payment, but lot links will be used much more sparingly - 
only to offset invoices/bills with credit notes. That should be rare enough to no longer clutter up 
the AP/AR accounts. The description on the lot links has been improved as well. And to clean up 
the existing lot links you can use Action->Check & Repair->This Account on your AP/AR 
accounts.

Regarding the use of "lots". It's an internal mechanism used to link together splits from two 
interdependent transactions, but that can't be represented in one single transaction. There are 
two main use cases:
- linking an invoice to its payment(s), which you already have found
- purchasing and selling stock (stock, bonds, shares,...)

An invoice and a payment are necessarily two different transactions in your book, but at the 
same time one would want to keep track of which invoices have already been paid or not. Lots 
track this. Similarly the purchase and sale of a stock are two different transactions, but one 
needs to link both of them together to calculate gain/loss on both transactions as a whole. 
Again a lot is used for this.

In most cases there's no need to deal with them directly. So the lot viewer can usually be left 
alone. In some exceptional cases the software handles the lots in another way than you'd like. 
At that point you can use the lot viewer to manually make corrections. Unless you know what 
you're doing I wouldn't advise this though.

Does that satisfy your curiosity ?

Regards,

Geert