How to pay 2-bills to 1-vendor with 1-check?

Adrien Monteleone adrien.monteleone at gmail.com
Mon Feb 5 20:39:28 EST 2018


First, I would not recommend editing in AP directly. Use the business features to create a vendor, then a bill for that vendor.

When you do so, paying multiple bills is as easy as choosing “Process Payment” in the Business > Vendor menu, entering the vendor name, selecting their bills you want to pay, making sure your date, check #, and proper checking account are selected. (you’ll still have to print this check separately, but this will handle the transaction)

You wouldn’t necessarily have separate AP accounts for each Vendor unless you wanted them. I’ve not tested doing so or if such sub accounts would work with the business features or if you have to keep everything lumped together in the special AP account that GnuCash created for you on startup. The Vendor reports preclude the need to do this. (you can create your own ‘statement of account’ with that vendor at any time for any time period)

If you really need to take the route of direct entry and not using the business features, then you should be able to post any transaction to any account you want. *Note, you might need to create a special AP account as type ‘other liability.’ You can move it back as a child of the special AP account if you like, but don’t create it as a child of that account initially, create it directly under Liabilities.

As for the transactions, you have the debits and credits backwards in your T account examples.

That would be:

Dr. Expenses > Lawn
Cr. AP ( or AP > pro Lawn Svc)

(debit is on the left, credit on the right - always)

Paying the bill you also have backwards:

Dr. AP > pro Lawn Svc
Cr. Checking

Both your T account example and the screen shot have the debits/credits correctly for a transaction that pays a liability.

As for your last question, using the business features will create a payment transaction in AP with two splits, one for each bill. Unfortunately, there is no way at present to ‘jump to’ or ‘view’ that bill from the AP register. You’ll have to look for it using the Find Bill feature, or by clicking the bill number in a Vendor Report.

Unfortunately, the AP register does not show you the linked bill for payment transactions. (the easy method here is to look at a Vendor Report) For this reason, the only editing I do of AP transactions is to add the relevant bill #s to the Memo lines for each ‘payment’ split. I do this from the account register I paid the bill from however, and NOT from the AP register - just to be safe. (though I don’t think it matters)

In addition, you can attach a link to a PDF scan of the bills using the right-click menu on the transaction. However, I don’t think you can attach two different files to different splits in the same transaction. What would be more useful here is instead attach the files to each bill transaction rather than the consolidated payment transaction.

You can take both routes if you need, using the business features for some liabilities and directly editing for others. However in this case, for the non-business feature direct editing, I would create a separate liability account called ‘Other Accounts Payable’ or something similar, or even by the vendor name (as you did here) and do manual entry there. Of course, direct entries are not visible at all to the business features or to any vendor related account. You would have to generate any similar reports in a manual fashion likely using the Transaction Report.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Feb 5, 2018, at 7:08 PM, Fran_3 <mailbox0600 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> We get billed by one vendor weekly but pay every two weeks.
> We started entering each weeks bill into AP individually
> Now we want to pay two of those bills with one check.
> I assume this is a split transaction
> But trying to do it from the check register I am unable to associate each split to a its associated bill...
> 
> The normal sequence to me (not an accountant :-) for an individual bill would be... post the bill...
> 
> Expense > Lawn            AP > pro Lawn Svc
> ------------------------       ------------------------
>              | 100                    100 |
>              |                                  |
> 
> Pay the bill
> 
>        Checking             AP > pro Lawn Svc
> ------------------------       ------------------------
>       100 |                                  |  100
>              |                                  |
> 
> But the below seems to do this when the bill is paid
> 
>        Checking             Liabilities > AP
> ------------------------       ------------------------
>       100 |                                  |  100
>              |                                  |
> 
> I would have thought in the "Account" column of the register I could get to AP > Lawn but it only let's me get to AP
> 
> How can I associate the each split with a particular bill from the vendor?
> 
> Thanks for any help.
> <split payment.png>



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