Recording all purchases under a vendor???

[Geert Janssens]

On Wednesday 25 March 2015 08:02:59 MP99 wrote:
> nssimpson wrote
> 
> > Around half of my vendors require immediate payment before shipping
> > any goods so I either pay them on card or bank transfer. Now when I
> > get their invoice should I be recording it as a vendor bill and
> > posting it so it appears in accounts payable and then immediately
> > setting it to paid? I've been reading help documentation and
> > watching YouTube tutorials and some people simply enter them
> > straight into an expenses sub-account rather than doing this so I'm
> > a bit confused.
> 
> Bear in mind that I'm feeling my way into accounting / gnucash too...
> 
> ISTM that one possibility here is that you record the payment to the
> supplier when you make it, eg current account to accounts payable. Of
> course you have no invoice (bill) at this point, so A/P will include
> this in its balance.
> 
> When the invoice comes in, you can record it as a bill, and post it.
> 
> However, you can then go into A/P, find the bank transaction and use
> edit / assign as payment... (it's also a right-click option). This
> will set the bill to paid. At this point, I also like to set the Ref
> to be the bill number (actually bnnnnnn), but that's possibly
> overkill.
> 
This works indeed. However, the way GnuCash was really designed to work 
is that if you receive a payment for a vendor before you have received 
the bill, you select Vendors->Process Payment... and record the payment 
against the proper vendor directly.

Then when the bill comes in, you enter it, post it, and immediatly 
choose "Pay Bill". The pre-payment will be in the payment dialog 
together with the bill. Select both lines to complete the payment.

This saves you a roundtrip to your checkings account to invoice "Assign 
as payment...".

Of course if you're not interested in AP tracking for a vendor at all, 
you can skip this altogether and record things as Maf suggested.

But me personally it gives me an uneasy feeling entering business 
partner related transactions outside of the business menus. So I always 
use those.

> 
> NB if you ever have reason to "unpost" the bill (EG you made a typo)
> the association of the payment is lost. After you've re-posted, that
> same process can re-associate the bank transaction to the bill.
> 
Here also, you can go directly to Vendor->Process Payment... to 
reconnect the payment and the bill. Feel free to use whichever way is 
most comfortable for you.

Geert