[GNC] Credits

[Adrien Monteleone]

Aaron,

I don’t think there is any definable max credit amount you can specify for a customer. (or yourself as in a credit card, or vender credit line for that matter)

I would suspect the ‘credit limit’ feature in the new customer dialog is there to flag a warning when you are posting invoices to their account when that limit is exceeded. ‘Credit’ here isn’t what you owe them, it is what they owe you. So a credit limit on their account of 1000, would mean they can’t have unpaid invoices of over 1000 at a time. It isn’t that you owe them 1000 due to an overpayment or discount/allowance that they haven’t ‘cashed in’ yet or that you haven’t yet refunded in cash. I don’t set limits for my customers, so I don’t know for sure what happens if the limit is exceeded.

There are two options with regards to customer credits:

1) Issue a Credit Note for the amount you want to credit the customer and apply it to future invoices as needed.
2) Process a Payment for the customer without selecting an invoice, this will appear as a ‘pre-payment’ and can be applied to future invoices as well.

You would choose the 2nd one if you haven’t yet recorded the receipt of that payment. (you would be balancing the AR portion of the transaction by a receipt of cash or undeposited funds)

You would choose the 1st option if you’ve already recorded that over/pre payment by other means and just want to reflect the credit portion to the customer, OR, if the credit is for some consideration like a discount/refund/incentive et cetera that you are balancing against an income/sales/revenue account such as ‘Discounts & Allowances’ or ‘Returns’.

You can either issue a credit note (a negative invoice) to a customer, then apply it to future invoices as it is used. (by using ‘Process Payment’ from the Business > Customer menu, then selecting both the credit note and new invoice - GnuCash will offset the invoice with the value of the credit note, if any is left over on the credit note, it will remain for the next invoice, if the invoice is still not satisfied you can optionally apply an payment from the customer to satisfy it at this time, or later)

Be mindful that the credit note shows you owe the customer. If you pay the credit note, you no longer owe the customer.

When you ‘apply as payment’ (or use ‘Process Payment) on a credit note, you are issuing a refund to the customer. That is probably not what you were intending.

Regards,
Adrien






> On Dec 17, 2019 w51d351, at 9:30 PM, Aaron Mina <aaron.schalau at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello Michael,
> 
> Thank you for pointing me there.  This helped me see the radio button option for "Invoice" and "Credit Note" when creating a new invoice.
> 
> I searched the site for "Credit Limit" and "Customer Credit Limit" to see if there was any documentation around that, thinking that it would be the credits that client has to use and then the credit note would subtract from that.  It doesn't look like it does that and I tried to post a payment to the credit note to find that it doesn't show up there either.
> 
> I am half way there, just need the other part of the puzzle, especially since this year is ending and trying to wind down the books.
> 
> Thank you for the help thus far, and here's to hoping to cross the finish line with this soon!
> Aaron
> 
> On 2019-12-15 6:13 a.m., Michael Hendry wrote:
>>> On 14 Dec 2019, at 22:00, Aaron Mina <aaron.schalau at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hello,
>>> 
>>> I would like to know how credits are used in GNUCash.  I am running 2.6.19 on Ubuntu.  I have a client that I want to start off with credits.  I put in a credit while opening the new customer dialogs.    I just posted an invoice to the account and when I went to pay it, the credits didn't show up.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> What is the proper way to assign credits to an account and use them?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Thank you,
>>> Aaron
>> 
>> I don’t use invoicing, but it would seem logical to issue a credit note to the customer when setting up, if you already owe that customer money.
>> 
>> https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Credit_Notes
>> 
>> Michael