Creating Account for each Vendor to avoid Creating and Paying each Bill?

[Adrien Monteleone]

There should be no need to create expense sub-accounts for vendors if all you want is a way to see how much you spent with them. (or still owe them at any point) That would also get quite messy if a vendor might sell items that fit in more than one expense account.

Create your vendors, create and post your bills, then pay the bills using the Process Payment feature.

You can then run a Vendor Report for each vendor for any date range and see total spent and paid to each with full transaction history and clickable links to either the transaction itself or the particular bill.

You can also run Payable Aging report to show you any amounts in arrears with links to find the particular bills.

Since you have lots of historical data you want to import, and it seems you’ll be importing the vendor payments as part of your checking account import, I’d suggest the following workflow:

Create a CSV file with all of your bill data. (you’ll need to create or import your vendors first)
Import this CSV to bring your bills in properly.
Do a Find on a few bills and run a Vendor Report or two to make sure everything imported okay.
Once your checking account transactions are imported (if not already there) you’ll need to click each payment to a vendor and use the ‘assign as payment’ option. This will then give you the ‘process payment’ window where you can search for a vendor, see all of their unpaid bills, then assign the transaction as a payment. (be mindful the dates, amounts, and check# are correct and that it is taking the payment from the proper account)

Now, everything is imported and properly assigned just as if you had entered it in real time originally from scratch.

As an added tip, when assigning payment to a transaction, I’d recommend tagging that transaction with the bill number from the Vendor. (or something to ID the payment for if the vendor doesn’t use invoice #s) Gnucash doesn’t make it easy by default to see what bills a payment applies to. (possible, just not easy) You’ll probably want to know that info from time to time when looking at a register. You have two main options here. Either turn on View > Double-line mode and use the Notes line for this info, or place it in the Memo of the split for either the checking account credit or the AP debit, whichever makes the most sense to you. (putting it in notes, also puts it in the memo for the AP debit split) Now, when you run a vendor report, you’ll see that bill# note in the Description column for easy reference.

Here’s a link to documentation on the CSV for importing bills/invoices: https://lists.gnucash.org/docs/C/gnucash-guide/import-invoices.html

Here’s the link for customers/vendors (note the caveat about billing info): https://lists.gnucash.org/docs/C/gnucash-guide/import-customers-vendors.html

If you’re coming from some other software, you might even be able to get that data exported as a CSV and then do some minor surgery on the column order for Gnucash to be happy rather than typing it all from scratch.


Regards,
Adrien

> On Feb 14, 2018, at 5:59 PM, Fran_3 via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
> OK, as I understand it after we import checking transactions for a small business...
> For each Vendor Payment we must first create a Bill and then Pay that bill so that it remains associated with the vendor. That's a lot of clicking and typing.
> So would this work?
> In the chart of accounts under say... Expenses > Office Supplies
> we create sub accounts for each Office supply vendor...
> Than from the check register just assign that payment to that account...
> Now we are tracking total office supply expenses and how much we spent with each vendor.
> We are considering this for 2017 transactions as we are under a very short deadline to come up with some numbers and every step we save helps.
> What do you think?
> Thanks,
> Fran3
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