GNUCash 'Credit Notes

[DaveC49]

Hi Gloriana,

One possible way of handling a credit note in your accounts would be to
create under an 
Income:Sales account an Income :SalesReturns account ( which has the Income:
account as a parent account of both where both accounts sum into the Income
account.

When you issue a credit Note for xx  you would make the following
transaction

Income :SalesReturns                Db    xx
AccountsReceivable                                              Cr  xx

The first part of the split  reverses the credit to the Income:Sales account
and the debit which would have occurred to AccountsReceivable when  the
initial sale was made  (This is assuming it was a sale where you issue
credit to the customer - for a cash sale it would be your Check account
which is credited in the reversing transaction).

So far this assumes that there were no taxes involved in the original
transaction. For a GST/VAT tax then the original sale would have been a
three-way split   with an additional credit to a Tax account (usually a
liability account) for the amount of the Tax and the corresponding debit to
the Accounts Receivable would be reduced by the amount of the tax.  The
reversing transactions then become

Income:SalesReturns          Db   xx
AccountsReceivable                                      Cr (xx-yy)
Liability:Tax                                                        Cr yy

There is no specific process in the Business menu for issuing a credit note
that I am aware of at this time so you would have to create the above
transaction splits from one of the account registers affected (e.g. 
AccountsReceivable for a credit sale or your check account for a cash sale)
and enter the splits as above.

You would enter an appropriate description in the Memo fields for each
account affected , e.g. "Credit Note  nnnnn issued to Bloggs for Item -----" 
to allow you to track the transactions.

You could simply do the debit to the Income:Sales account for the reversal
instead of using the Income:SalesReturns contra account. The advantage of
using the contra account is that as a business, you normally would want to
keep track of your sales returns to identify faulty products which are
reducing your sales so you can improve or remove the product.



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