Fast receipt entry into gnuCash is a UI / work flow problem

[Geert Janssens]

On Thursday 25 June 2015 10:25:17 Mart wrote:
> Lots of interesting ideas but lets' be honest: This is mostly a
> UI/work flow problem.
> 
> Lets say I have bill I need to pay or have paid in the past and
> finally got around to update GnuCash
> 
>  From business perspective, regarding VAT, it doesn’t matter in which
> month I make the payment - if bill was issued in May, it must be part
> of May VAT calculations.
> 
This depends on your country. Until recently this was also valid in 
Belgium, but the law has changed and soon we'll have to take payment 
dates into account for VAT calculations instead of invoice date.

> For start, there is no button on the toolbar for "New Bill"
> 1) Select Business,
> 2) Select Vendor
> 3) Select New Bill  (3 moves/clicks!) 0 lines of data entered
> 4) Select Date opened - 22.05.2015
> 5) Select (Lets say it's a existing vendor or this will branch off to
> another fork flow / use case)
You can also just start typing the name of an existing vendor in the 
vendor text entry field. Saves you several clicks to select the vendor.

> 6) Lets say Description matches previous bill (so I can skip selecting
> accounts etc) If not, you need to make many more moves (and this
> branches off to another fork flow / use case)
> 7) Click "Post This Invoice to your Chart of Accounts"
> 8) Adjust Due Date

Due date will be calculated for you if you defined the proper billing 
terms. Other than that I agree there are many improvements possible in 
the business workflow.

> 
> So far I have done 9 moves to get the relevant data entered
> 
> 9) click "Enter Payment"
> 10) In Transaction Details Date has changed to Today??? Why not show
> Due Date? - Change the date
Because due date is equally arbitrary as Today. You make the assumption 
that everybody always pays invoices on the due date only. For my 
workflow that is much more unlikely than that I have paid the bill 
today. I tend to enter the bills in Gnucash, then go to my bank to make 
the payments and then mark the bills paid in gnucash. 

I'm not saying my workflow is superior. I do believe Due Date is less 
likely to be correct than Today in most workflows.

> 11) Select Assets
> 12) Select Current Assest
> 13) Select Bank Account or what ever you use
> 
> We can save 3 useless moves I have to do every time over and over
> again, if we had option to defined default account for payments -
> Bank Account in my case. Maybe use last one?
Then you have discovered a bug. GnuCash should remember the last account 
you have used, per vendor. So if you paid ACME last time via bank A, the 
next ACME payment should propose bank A again.

> 
> 
> 14) Click OK
> 
> and start it all over again
> 
> How to speed this up?
> 
> A) Open up only one window, with all the related fields and dropdowns,
> where I can use tab to jump form one filed to to another one and get
> it done as fast as possible.
> 
This has been under discussion several times. I agree. Nobody has found 
time to implement such an interface yet.

> B) Add "Date Opened" option for entering this stuff directly to
> selected account ledger... but what happens to Date Opened?
> 
I don't understand this proposal.

> Cheers!
> 
> PS! I have no idea why anyone, except business, even bothers entering
> every invoice they had to pay into Gnucash but never mind that for
> now.

Heh, ditto. The business features are indeed really intended for 
businesses which require a more formal tracking of (business) 
transactions. These addons are not intended for personal use. On the 
other hand people are free to use the software however they like (GPL 
explicitly allows this ;)


Geert


> On 23.06.2015 03:55, Bob Brush wrote:
> > Some of the barcode standards allow special characters to be
> > embedded, so you might could make a workflow table with barcodes to
> > step through, auto fill should make short work of repetitive
> > entries.
> > 
> > It does look like the program might need a bit of working over as I
> > don't see shortcuts to open a certain register and enter a new
> > transaction, but it might be there and hidden..
> > 
> > If you are using Linux the following programs might help, I had to
> > unpost and repost 300 bills one time..
> > 
> > xvkbd
> > xkbevd
> > xdotool
> > xautomation
> > wmctrl
> > 
> >> On Jun 22, 2015, at 4:14 PM, dave <dboland9 at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> >> 
> >> Ok, I admit I'm a little lazy, and that I have three months of
> >> receipts to enter.  But hey, who has not been there?  I was
> >> thinking, it would be great if there was a really fast way to
> >> enter recipts into gnuCash (this is a very boring task).  Then it
> >> hit me - QR codes.  Here is how my idea would work:
> >> 
> >> 1. You go to the store an purchase something.  You get a receipt,
> >> and the receipt has a QR code at the bottom that contains the
> >> store name and location, the date of purchase, the amount, and
> >> mayment method.
> >> 
> >> 2. Accumulate a few weeks of receipts (like most of us do).
> >> 
> >> 3. Start gnuCash, then grap a QR code reader of some sort.  Scan
> >> the code, and gnuCash pops up a screen to enter the account(s),
> >> hit Eneter, next receipt.
> >> 
> >> Cool - right?
> >> 
> >> Of course we would need the cooperation of our friends from Intuit,
> >> retailers, and perhaps some sort of standards org.  Oh, and the
> >> gnuCash developers/community.
> >> 
> >> Any thoughts?
> >> 
> >> Dave,
> >> 
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