Working with membership accounts

[Buddha Buck]

List etiquette is to use "reply-all" so responses go back to the list for
everyone's benefit. I am including the list in my reply for that reason.

On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 1:39 AM Raymond Laverty <raymond.laverty at lylt.net>
wrote:

> Hi Buddha Buck,
>
> thanks for the prompt response. We only send invoices once a year (annual
> membership), but as you said, I’d nearly prefer to keep the
> members/invoices out of the system if it’s too much hassle, unless you know
> an easy way to import csv file with all the data in there already.
>

GnuCash does have a facility for importing both customers and invoices in a
CSV file. Basically, the customer CSV file has one row per customer, and
the invoice CSV file has one row per invoice line (so a single invoice may
be multiple rows, all with the same invoice number). For membership
invoices, you'd really only need one line per invoice, one invoice per
member per year.

As it happens, because of this situation, I have been writing a Ruby On
Rails membership management application which will generate importable CSV
GnuCash invoices. It's set up for monthly membership dues, but I'm sure
that if you, or someone you know, is comfortable with the phrase "forking a
Rails project on GitHub and customizing it" you might find it helpful. If
you (or anyone else on the list) is interested, let me know.


> Basically, all I really need at this stage is way of showing that X amount
> of membership fees are still outstanding, and of course this number should
> decrease when a payment comes in. For that ’ll try what you suggested with
> a membership dues account in Assets and a scheduled transaction.
>

If you have, as an organizational policy a rule like "all annual dues are
due on Jan 1" setting up the scheduled transaction is easy. It's when you
have "Renewal dues are due on the anniversary of the member joining" that's
a pain, as you'd have to have as many scheduled transactions as members.


>
> Thanks again,
>

No problem.


>
> Ray
>
>