[GNC] How to handle bounced check

[Geert Janssens]

Op zaterdag 2 februari 2019 09:37:02 CET schreef Wm via gnucash-user:
> On 02/02/2019 04:24, Mike Alexander wrote:
> > A few weeks ago I received a check in payment for an invoice I had sent to
> > a customer.  I recorded the payment and deposited the check.  A couple of
> > weeks later I got notice from my bank that the check had bounced.  My
> > question is how to record this.  I want to “unpay” the invoice and charge
> > the amount back to the customer, but I can’t find a good way to do this.
> > 
> > I tried entering a transaction to debit Accounts Receivable and credit the
> > bank account after which I manually added the split in A/R to the lot for
> > that invoice.
> my opinion is you are overthinking this
> 
>  >This sort of worked, but the invoice is still marked paid in the
> 
> customer report.  I can, however, select it in the “Process Payment”
> dialog to pay it again and it shows up as unpaid in the receivables
> aging report.  Can I do better than this?
> 
> The accounting is ordinary, the customer owes you the money from the
> original date.
> 
> The invoice, payment, bounce sequence is a record of events.  I think
> this should show in your accounts, other people think it shouldn't,
> dunno why, it is a reflection of the person that didn't pay, not you.
> 
> Ordinary solution?  Make a new invoice and let the person know you
> expect it to be paid.

In double accounting that would create a mismatch between the document flow 
and the money flow:
- you'd have two documents claiming you are to receive money
- you have entered one payment and one refund
Summing all of those together it would seem you should still receive two 
payments.

You could balance this by writing an internal credit note to cater for the 
bounced check and then write a new invoice (which you could send to the 
customer to inform them of a bounced check).

Back to the original question: I think gnucash will try its best to keep you 
from adding a reverse payment to an already paid invoice. So what you did via 
manual lot manipulation is probably the closest you can get to that outcome.

There is however yet another way to see this: if the check bounced it didn't 
really pay for the invoice to start with.

So you could decouple the payment from the invoice (the easiest way is by 
unposting and reposting the invoice). Then presuming you want to keep record 
of the fact that you received a check, you can keep the payment around and 
directly credit it via the Process Payment dialog to indicate it bounced. That 
is, you can select the payment only in that dialog and have gnucash "pay" for 
that payment, which is to say gnucash would refund that payment.

Geert