[GNC] best accounting practice for refund

[Geert Janssens]

The way I understand your scenario I believe you can model what the customer 
does almost one to one into gnucash actions.

1. Customer prepays for expenses -> Create a payment for that customer using 
Business->Customer->Process Payment
You can choose to map this payment to outstanding invoices or not. If you 
don't, it will simply register a prepayment for the customer.

2. At some point you send an invoice to the user -> Create this invoice using
Business->Customer->New Invoice... and post it.

3. Now you can choose - does your invoice have (some of) the prepaid expenses 
? If so, apply (part of) that prepayment to your invoice using Business-
>Customer->Process Payment
After this there may be an outstanding balance the customer still has to pay.

4. If the customer pays that outstanding balance, create the payment via 
Business->Customer->Process payment.

Then repeat for the next cycle/invoice.

If you are importing your payments instead of manually entering them, you can 
also select the payment in the respective account, right-click and choose 
"Assign as payment..." instead of the above mentioned "Process Payment"

As Adrien also suggests at any time you could look at the Receivables Aging or 
Customer report to see what's the customer's current balance.

Regards,

Geert

Op woensdag 26 juni 2019 21:52:43 CEST schreef Adrien Monteleone:
> You have at least 2 options I can think of at the moment:
> 
> #1 - continue to issue credit notes in your system, but don’t send them out
> or pay them with a check. When you have the next positive invoice, ‘pay’ a
> portion (or all) of that invoice with the credit note. Simply process a
> payment, select the credit note line and an invoice line you want to apply
> it to in the top part of the window. GnuCash will offset the invoice with
> the credit note for you. If the credit note is more than the invoice, it
> will retain the left over as remaining AR credit to be used on subsequent
> invoices. You can see the customer’s balance any time either by looking at
> an AR aging report, or a Customer Report. Outstanding credit notes appear
> in the Invoices Due Reminder window.
> 
> #2 - If your client regularly pays in advance based on an estimate and you
> invoice later, instead of applying the payment to an invoice, apply it to a
> Liabilities:Customer Deposits account. Then when you create and post the
> final invoice, process a payment for it from this account. You could keep a
> separate deposit account for each customer but that might get tedious. You
> can run a report on the account sorted by payee to show that info and even
> keep that report open in a tab if desired, choosing to refresh it as
> needed. If this might only happen for pre-paid expenses, then you can still
> use this method, but only for the pre-paid expense part, which you could
> (or not) choose to invoice separately.
> 
> Regards,
> Adrien
> 
> > On Jun 26, 2019, at 1:46 PM, Eric Rathhaus office <eric at ewrlaw.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Hi - I have a client for whom I have many jobs.  On some of these jobs,
> > the client prepaid expenses that I did not use.  In the past, I’ve always
> > created a credit note for a refund and sent the client a check.  However,
> > my client prefers instead that I credit this amount towards future work. 
> > I’m not sure how to accomplish this cleanly.  I could keep a running
> > total of the amount and discount from the total prepayment until it’s
> > used up.  But this seems clunky and maybe not the best practice.  Any
> > other suggestions on how to account for the refund against future work?
> > 
> > Kind regards,
> > 
> > Eric W. Rathhaus
> 
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