[GNC] Business Feature Question

[Adrien Monteleone]

Not sure you really need to use invoices and customers here, but if it works...

Are these recurring grants from the same sources for the same purposes? It might make more sense then. I just don’t see it for one-offs.

My understanding of ‘jobs’ per previous list discussion is that ‘job’ is probably the wrong term. It’s more like a ‘purchase order’ which aggregates line items ordered from a vendor. Because of this, I never was able to use the feature so I’m not sure how ‘chargebacks’ work. If anything, I’d think charging items from a vendor to a customer would be possible, but not the other way around.

You can have the same ‘job title' for both a customer and a vendor, but if I recall correctly, they are two separate jobs and are not linked to each other.

Derek, who wrote the feature, explained it to me in this thread: https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2018-August/079310.html. (start there, total of about 4-5 messages, I don’t think I got around to filing that bug report for renaming, will have to check)

As an answer to the second question, and possibly address the first at the same time, I’d say it might be simpler to use the Notes or split Memos to ‘categorize’ your expenses per grant. Which you use, would depend on if a single transaction applies to one grant or might apply to multiple grants.

I can see though how using virtual sub-accounts of checking might be useful for running reports, but again, this would be part of the tree to maintain that might not be necessary since you can filter a transaction report on Notes and Memos.

On the last question, I do this frequently for various reasons. I always edit from the account the money is coming from/going to (never within the A/P or A/R registers themselves), usually the cash account in my case, and *avoid* editing any split in the transaction with ‘payment’ in the Action field as this is what is keyed for the business features. If you need to edit one of those splits, then edit the payment via the right-click context menu. (I say avoid because on a few rare occasions of trying to fix a lot mess in one of those accounts, I did edit them, though in hind-sight I could have managed with the ‘Edit payment’ function as well)

Regards,
Adrien

> On Feb 27, 2019, at 11:14 AM, David T. via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Long time user with a question regarding the business features and grants. Specifically, I am setting up a business file for a business that receives grant monies from different organizations in exchange for various services.
> 
> I’ve set up the granting agencies as customers in the books, and created jobs for each grant. I have set up the grant payment as a customer invoice in A/R against an Income:Grants account for the full amount of the grant, and paid this invoice with the money from the agency. Now, GnuCash shows the business has received this money from this agency. Setting the grants up as customers then allows me to use vendor bills to pay subcontractors against this customer job.
> 
> My first question is a general one: does this pass a sanity test, or is there some other more sane way to manage this? 
> 
> My second general question is, if I should wish to track and assign specific expenses to specific grants, what is the best approach? Subaccounts in the checking account for each grant’s money? I am imagining this would be best, but welcome other ideas.
> 
> Finally, if there is a bank fee assessed against the incoming funds along the way to the checking account, what is the best way to handle this? I creeated the invoice in the original amount, paid the full amount, and then edited the payment record to add a split for the bank fee and change the amount arriving in the checking account. I am unsure if this is the correct way to handle this, however—especially since I know I’ve read that editing the A/P & A/R accounts is considered Bad. Did I destroy my books by doing this?
> 
> TIA,
> David
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