Handling Debit Opening Balances for Customers

[Geert Janssens]

Hi Nelson,

See answers in between.

On Sunday 13 September 2015 18:17:46 Nelson Handcock wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> Using GN 2.6.3...I haven't upgraded fr a while but then again I'm not
> sure the current version is quite stable based on the number of
> threads talking about various upgrade issues....
> 
> 
> I'm in the process of transferring customer balances from previous
> year to next financial year.
> 
> I've decided to start a new gnucash file because the current one is
> too big - it takes several minutes to open or run a report due to the
> number of transactions.
> 
> My new file has been built by exporting and importing the account
> tree, and by loading up the customers using the import utility.
> 
> I've created an "Opening Balances" asset account, so that I can enter
> the closing balances from the old file - no problems. Some values are
> where the customer has a credit balance and some are where the
> customer owes money (a Debit amount).

You probably shouldn't be entering these values manually. See below.
> 
> To get these balances to show up on the customer report I have to use
> the "assign as Payment" function. I have learned that I have to have
> an invoice to select to do this - some customers don't have an
> invoice in the new financial year so I create one to use and then
> unpost it later on.
> 
That looks a bit like a detour to me. You could open
Business-Customer-Process Payment and immediately enter a new payment for the customer 
(debit or credit) and "pay" it against your opening balances account. There's no need to first 
issue an invoice for that as far as I know. Via this method you can enter both debit and credit 
amounts for a customer.

> What I've noticed is that where the customer has a Debit opening
> balance, if I try to use the "Assign as Payment" then the pop-up
> screen assumes that I'm trying to assign a payment to a Vendor, and I
> therefore can't use the function at all because I'm trying to assign
> a debit to a customer.
> 
> The only way around it is to use the "Pay Invoice" function and enter
> the amount as a refund, and post it to the Opening Balances account.
> Nothing really wrong with that, except that it take a number of extra
> steps to run the customer report, open the invoice, choose the "Pay
> Invoice" option...compared to assigning as payment where the pay
> invoice pop-up comes straight up and I can enter the customer name,
> choose the account and bam - done.
> 
Would Business-Customer-Process Payment be a sufficient improvement in this case ?

> 
> I'm wondering if this is something that could be fixed - so that when
> the "assign as payment" feature is used, you can select either a
> vendor or a customer.
> 
> I'm happy to submit a formal development request if people think it's
> something that should/could be looked at by the developers?
> 

There has been discussion in the past over the limits of the assign as payment option. I agree 
it would make sense if it were smarter and there is already an enhancement request for this 
[1].

For your specific use case it appears to me the Business-Customer-Process Payment route is as 
efficient as assign as payment (though you could have saved some time by not entering the 
opening balances manually first and will have to remove these manually entered transactions 
again).

Regards,

Geert


[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=719904