Issues with Jobs and Purchase Orders.

Sun May 28 21:21:28 EDT 2017

Bruce,

If you are in a situation where vendors honor POs as issued and fill them in full or not at all, you could probably get away with creating a bill and not posting it and using that as the PO until the order is filled and then posting. However, there’s the intermediate step of shipping manifest/bill of lading that is not accounted for, which GC is not set up to handle. If you can live with this, that might be your work around, but this might complicate ownership/posting based on FOB status when crossing periods, especially at end of year. Otherwise, I’d suggest some solution outside of GC for those functions and then just record the monetary accounting in GC. There are plenty of possibilities but two that come to mind readily are Odoo (formerly OpenERP) and Fishbowl. Odoo is free as in beer AND open source and extremely configurable, though they constantly want to sell you their managed services; I think Fishbowl is very inventory centric but not open source, though I could be mistaken. Certainly there are other options depending on your needs. A business client I’m currently assisting is opting for an entirely customized inventory system rather than modifying a canned setup. Your mileage will vary according to industry.

Regards,

Adrien

> On May 28, 2017, at 5:41 PM, Bruce Danielson <DanielsonB at LogRoom.com> wrote:
> 
> Thank you Adrien, all that is pretty much what I figured.  Sorry about the misleading subject, left over from a previous question.
> 
> In the construction contracting world, a vendor invoice better match the PO to the penny, or there's the devil to pay.  The PO is an implied contract, and acceptance of the PO by the vendor is tantamount to signing  a contract.  Contractor's take this seriously, and the PO also has the effect of encumbering (obligating) the funds.  When the PO is issued, the total amount is charged against job cost, long before an invoice arrives.
> 
> I don't know many businesses that don't use PO's so this would be a great feature to add.  And yes vendors might make multiple shipments (and invoices) for a PO - sounds a little like a Job, yes?
> 
> 
> I get all that about Jobs - kinda limited functionality I think.
> Thank you again Adrien - I appreciate your time & response.  :)
> Bruce
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: gnucash-user [mailto:gnucash-user-bounces+danielsonb=logroom.com at gnucash.org] On Behalf Of Adrien Monteleone
> Sent: Saturday, May 27, 2017 9:18 PM
> To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Subject: Re: Issues with Importing Invoices
> 
>> On May 27, 2017, at 10:36 PM, Bruce Danielson <DanielsonB at LogRoom.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Greetings - I am a fairly new user, and have a couple of business questions.
>> I was looking to see if I can make, print & send to vendors Purchase 
>> Orders in GnuCash, and assign this to job(s) if necessary.  I see 
>> Orders in the Properties / Counters tab but there is little to no 
>> explanation as to what this is for.  Could be for stock orders, but 
>> having them pre-numbered doesn't make sense.  This looks like maybe a 
>> latent Purchase Order numbering?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Yes I can twist & alter a custom Vendor Bill printout to say Purchase 
>> Order, & send that, but that's not exactly the same thing.  So just 
>> wondering what the thoughts are on that.
> 
> Since GnuCash doesn t handle inventory, I d suspect purchase orders aren t included either. I ve been using the business features for about 3 years and I ve never stumbled upon any such animal. It would be nice to generate them and then turn them into bills. I suppose creating a bill and not posting could be a work around, but my experience is POs and actual Vendor bills rarely match 100%. (I ve seen vendors frequently fill partial orders over several shipments and invoices - this would be a pain in GC)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On a related topic - are the Jobs relating to Customers the same as 
>> Jobs relating to vendors?  Can A Job relate to A Vendor with multiple 
>> Bills AND also to A Customer with multiple Invoices?  This is a little 
>> confusing, but I can see from what I do having A Job that covers A Customer AND A Vendor.
>> Trouble is I might have multiple vendors, but usually one customer per job.
>> 
> 
> Unfortunately, jobs cannot have multiple vendors or customers and the same job is not used for both. You can create a vendor job and a custom job with the same name (I m pretty sure) but it can only be assigned to one or the other and only one at a time. Within that limitation though, yes a single job, tied to a single customer or vendor can have multiple invoices or bills, just only for that single customer or vendor.
> 
> There is also the ability to  charge back  expenses to customers. This might accomplish some of what you might look for in using the same job for a vendor and customer, but certainly not everything.
> 
> This situation makes the jobs feature very limited in utility. While single customer jobs might be more likely, single vendor jobs are nearly non-existent. I think at least on the vendor side, this was either an oversight or work left to be done by the original programmers.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Adrien
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Any feedback on either topic is appreciated.  
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Buster
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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