Scheduled Transactions and Payables

[Wm]

Sun, 8 Mar 2015 13:14:52 <1425845692542-4676727.post at n4.nabble.com> 
YeOldHinnerk <HRamthun at gmx.de>

>Now, not using business features does not mean that I don't have accounts
>which are of the very nature of Accounts Receivable / Payable.

make them type Asset or Liability and you can do what you want with 
them, A/R and A/P are special types of Asset and Liability

> I set up
>manually accounts for all companies I regularly owe money to (insurances,
>electricity, ...), book scheduled transactions at the beginning of each
>month correpsondingly and when the payments goes through checking, the other
>leg is the account R/P. This has proven usefull for me and works quite well.

Liability.  If you always just pay the bill or pay regularly and the 
payment gets adjusted for reality Expense only is simpler

>Mostly I was asking, since I saw the "Date due" in my accounts payable and
>would like to use it, since my sx is always just for the first of the month
>so that I can do some proper liquidity planning and know what will go
>through my checking account this month.

I use the actual date I know the payment is going to happen in my 
Liability a/c, no first of the month guesswork required.  It gives me a 
cash flow of diminishing accuracy into an indefinite future.  It also 
means I don't need what most people think of as a budget.

> But it may be interesting to have
>this slightly more granular and actually see the exact date due (and report
>accordingly, I naturally assumed there would be report based on this or the
>possibility to generate corresponding payements for my checking account
>through hbci...).

No special report is needed, my main tool is a transaction report 
starting today and running for months or years into the future as 
needed.

>I'm not exactly sure what the consequence of this is. I certainly could set
>the accounts to a different type - but not using the business features
>apparently means, that there is no problem.

Yup.

> I also wondered shortly, if it
>would make sense to enable the business features,

probably not for personal books

> but was slightly shocked
>that payments coming into checkings are not directly linked to the AP but
>rather Process Payment has to be manually started for each payment. I guess
>from a business viewpoint this makes sense, but from a private finance
>viewpoint, this is just manual overhead.

More than that it makes no sense in private finance so no need to be 
shocked [1]

[1] On a minor note I wonder if shocked means the same to you as a 
native english speaker, let me put it this way, I don't stick my fingers 
into a mains plug very often, I am regularly surprised though, sometimes 
pleasantly so :)

>But coming back to my initial question about the scheduled transactions,
>let's try to take a more general approach: There are various kind of
>accounts (investment accounts being another special one). Shouldn't the
>scheduled transaction editor then allow to also populate all the
>corresponding fields of the accounts it generates trx for? I know this is
>not a trivial task, since the various legs may be in all kind of accounts -
>but still: Wouldn't this be the proper behavior for this interface?

You'd have to try out all the possibilities and report back.  The 
obvious problem is that if you send EUR100 off to your broker to buy 
something you won't know how many and what price until afterwards. Ditto 
if you deal on-line so it seems moot to me.

-- 
Wm...