[GNC] Editing, moving customer lists, possible child lists

[David Cousens]

Jonathon,

The customer information is separate from any account information. It is not
generally necessary to have an account for each customer that you have as
the customer information can be linked to a specific transaction  to an
account. An account in Gnucash is a register which records the movement of
funds. They may be associated with actual bank accounts for example or also
with categories of information that you require either for business
management and/or reporting purposes.

1. Menu->Business->Customer Overview should give you a liost of all
customers which can be sorted by any of the column including the customer
name. ( it is set as a company name, but you would use th customers name).

2. My understanding of the business account  structure is that Accounts
Receivable and Accounts Payable only have a single account for each currency
you use and cannot have sub-accounts. To meet your requirment, you would
likely have to raise two invoices for each transaction with a customer, one
for their personal billing and a second for billing their insurance. This
would probably require you to have two customer listing associated with each
physical customer name, e.g. 
Davy Jones personal information
Davy Jones Insurance information  (you could use the insurance company
details as the billing address in this case).
It will be fairly difficult to get rate information to come up automatically
in GnuCash.

To use GnuCash as it is intended you shouldn't have to have any detailed
experience as a developer. It is useful to have some computing skills if you
wish to customize it more to your specific needs. Apart from the initial
account heirarchy setup this would mainly involve customizing reports to
meet your needs. This can involve programming in Scheme ( A LISP language
implementation) and using CSS stylesheets to style the reports.

Using the database backends will require some expertise in database
management, particularly for making backups replicating databases and fixing
things when there are problems with a database. Sqlite3 is the easiest
option for users with limited database experience. GnuCash is not a full
database product in that it doesn't allow simultaneous access by multiple
users which is one major reason people generally want database applications.

GnuCash automatically produces backupsin the directory in which you store
the books, i.e. on the computer you have GnuCash running on. If that
computer fails, you have a serious problem. In addition you would want to
backup to either another computer, a Network storage device and/or
preferrably to an offsite location as well.  If your computer has an
adequate backup system in place it may already cover these needs.

David Cousens
Gnuca



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David Cousens
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