[GNC] How To Process a Payment Without Invoicing?

[Adrien Monteleone]

Greg,

Needing to generate the invoice to get the customer to pay you and generating the invoice to create the income-A/R transaction are two different things. You still need to record the revenue/income earned. You can continue to generate the invoice to do so even if you don’t send it to the customer. (they might want it anyway later for their records) That would also allow you to record the revenue earned in the period which you earned it, which fulfills the ‘matching principle’ of accounting. However, while you could by-pass the business features, you really should *not* record income manually in the official A/R register. (but you can create another account called “Other Accounts/Receivable” and use that - just be sure to set it’s type as ‘asset’ and not ‘A/R’)

If you like, you can record a manual transaction as you do the work under an account called “Accrued Revenue” balanced against a revenue/income account and then invoice against that to A/R when sending an invoice at project completion. (or periodically, however you prefer)

Another advantage to continuing to use the invoicing feature is that is the only way to have GnuCash keep track of what they owe. (should they miss a payment) You can then run a Customer Report (account statement) if needed and even see aging history. If you decide to by-pass the business features, you’ll have to make up your own account statements, and track aging separately. (as well as match up payments to work done separately)

If you are going to continue to use the business features to generate an invoice and need to pay it, simply right-click the payment transaction after you download it from your bank and choose “Assign as payment” and then proceed as if they had mailed it in.

If you are doing this manually, you’ll need to create a manual transaction assigning those funds to ‘pay’ the “other Accounts/Receivable” balance created by the manual transaction that recorded your revenue/income.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Apr 2, 2019, at 2:46 PM, Greg Feneis <mfeneis at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> (Win 7-64, GnuCash 3.5)
> 
> Hi Folks,
> 
> Usually, when I work for a client, I use GnuCash to generate an invoice
> that details what I've done and what I expect to get paid and send that
> invoice to the client.  Then, the clent pays me the amount on the invoice,
> and when I receive the payment, in GnuCash I pay the invoice.
> 
> Recently, I started working for a client that automatically tracks what
> I've done through an app on my phone and pays me accordingly (ACH deposits
> directly to my business checking account  a few times per week).  So it
> would seem I don't really need to generate an invoice to send them to get
> them to pay me, so shouldn't need to generate an invoice at all.
> 
> But how do I record the payment in GnuCash appropriately without going
> through the invoicing routine?
> 
> Thanks for any help
> 
> 
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Greg Feneis