Invoice & Bill Posting Date Issues Across Multiple Periods

[Adrien Monteleone]

Mike,

There are several dates at issue, but the main one I’m concerned with is ‘a’ or ‘when work done’.

The problem is that this date infrequently occurs in the same period as either the real or effective date of the invoice/bill, or the date you open/post it in GnuCash.

Receiving, creating and posting a bill in December, for work done in November, should show up on reports in November as that was when the work was done. But it doesn’t. It shows up in December. One can enter the November dates on the line items in the bill, but that seems to be informational only and has no effect.

This is even more pronounced when a single bill has line items for work done in multiple periods. Only one period will show those expenses, and likely, it will be the period the bill was entered in, not any of the periods when the work was done.

(the same is equally true for income/invoices)

To fix this, I have to make correcting entries. I’m only having to make a correction because GnuCash didn’t use the data I put into it so that the expenses/income hit their proper periods of when the activity actually took place and instead used one of the artificial dates of document exchange/data entry.

Certainly, I can ‘post’ to any date I like, so for single-period bills/invoices, this can mitigated somewhat, but there is no easy solution for multi-period documents. With the case of pre-paid expenses, I really shouldn’t post until the pre-billing is paid. (loosing the Bills Due Reminder in the process)


Regards,
Adrien

> On Dec 15, 2017, at 4:20 PM, Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at dialup4less.com> wrote:
> 
> I have zero experience with gnucash's invoicing system. Nevertheless I think in this conversation dates may be confused. When I receive an invoice, say for a visit to the doctor, there are SEVERAL dates involved.
> 
> a) The date the service was performed.
> b) The effective date of the invoice prepared by the doctor's billing service.
> c) The real time date when the invoice was prepared by the billing service
> 
> Which of these dates are we talking about? And from the doctor's point of view, which of these dates (were we using gnucash) would be used for the date of the transaction? << when affecting AR >>
> 
> When people are talking about periods being crossed "when work done" vs "when invoice prepared" I wonder whether all are talking about the same date. And if gnucash IS using the real time date when somebody gets around to entering data, there may be a different sort of problem.
> 
> Michael D Novack
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