Issues with Importing Invoices

[Bruce Danielson]

Greetings - I am a new user, and I am trying out GnuCash on a rather odd
application - I manage a couple of employee water clubs at work (for
Sparkletts bottled water - since our employer won't spring for the water -
pardon the pun).  I have it setup as a business type of accounting.  I'm
trying this on the smaller & newer of the clubs I manage.  Weird I know, but
I want to make this work.  I am also treasurer of a non-profit, I wish I'd
known about GnuCash before I went & bought QB.  But OK, for the water club -

 

I was able to import a bunch of customers (club members) via a csv file I
made from an Excel roster.  So far, so good.  I have an asset account called
Cash On Hand which monthly dues will pay into, and water bills will be paid
out of.  And I have only one Vendor (Sparkletts) and one applicable expense
account (bottled water).  

 

Since I don't really want to produce 36 separate invoices each month for
member dues, one at a time, I am hoping to find a way to sort of batch
generate invoices.  I have tried numerous times making a small 2 line csv
file from an excel table to import, and have run into several issues.  It is
only 2 lines now because I have 2 customers that are late paying for May, so
I thought I'd try this out on them.

 

One issue is that if I leave the ID field blank, "import" does not self
generate invoice ID's - but instead just ignores the lines.  OK - no
worries, I can plug in invoice numbers in the excel table, that's not too
much work.  The more serious issue is this, although the specific customers
are C033 and C034 - when I import, both invoices generated are applied to
one of the customers only (C033) and none to the other customer (C034).  I
generate 2 invoices, but both for the same customer (C033).

 

Import Invoices is not reading the customer (Owner ID) in the table and
applying to the correct customer.  This I do not know how to work around.
I'm looking for ideas or anything I may be doing wrong.  I have upgraded to
the latest version 2.6.16 (rev 509ce16+) BTW.

 

Really, if I cannot batch-make invoices, I can't make use of GnuCash.
Trying to generate 36 (or so) individual invoices on the 1st of each month
is not going to work for me.

 

I know this is probably a better application for just using Excel, but I
wanted to give this a try.  Actually if I could figure a way to batch email
my batch prepared invoices, this would be totally awesome.

 

Any feedback is appreciated.  I will be away from this email address for a
couple of days, so no big emergency.

Thanks,

 

Buster