Properly recording mixed/variable Invoice payment

[Maf. King]

On Saturday, 29 July 2017 23:24:12 BST Jason Cooper wrote:
> All,
> 
> I've been using GnuCash to manage my company's books for almost a year
> now.  Recently, my primary customer (whom I have little control over)
> started mixing several reimbursements into one check.  So the history of
> events goes like this:
> 
> 15th: Send Invoice for services rendered this month
> 25th: Receive check for Invoice amount *plus*:
> 	- Any reimbursable expenses approved before the 9th
> 	- Any per-diem accrued to date
> 
> The kicker is that I have no idea which expenses are going to be
> reimbursed this pay period, nor do I know how much per-diem they
> calculated I should get (based on travel requests).  So I can't reflect
> any of that when I cut the Invoice.
> 
> How on Earth do I track this correctly given the lack of information at
> Invoice time?
> 

Hi Jason,

with the obvious caveats that I'm in the UK and I'm not an accountant, so you 
may wish to check this with someone who knows your local rules & regs, I would 
observe the following for your consideration....

1. Reimbursement of expenses is not income.  I don't know about per diems,  I 
imagine that they could be taxable income.

2. You can edit an invoice in GC by unposting it then re-posting it.

3. You can make alterations to the payment transaction from the bank account 
side.

I would do the following.

Write the invoice out for what you do know - so the services for the month, 
which presumably uses an account like income:sales.  Add whatever you need to 
to claim the PD payment (possibly to income:PD) and ignore the total for the 
expenses, as you say that is listed on a spreadsheet.

When you come to record the payment, go back in to the invoice and alter the 
PD calculation to assign the correct number to income:PDs  (obviously, the 
custome doesn't need to see the revised invoice).  Then process payment for 
the total of that invoice (which should be less than the actual payment 
received)

I imagine you are able to accrue the expenses for repayment in GC, with an 
account structure like:
Assets:ReimbursableExps:Customer1
Assets:ReimbursableExps:Customer2
etc

so when you buy things on their behalf, you have a transaction between the 
appropriate expense accounts and the customer account above.  This will let 
you see quickly how much each customer owes at any given time.

After you've processed the payment for the invoice, go into the transaction in 
the bank account and add a split to Assets:Reimb:Customer1 and increase the 
total going into the bank account to reflect reality.

Hope this gives you some ideas.
Maf.