[GNC] How to suppress automatic refund fill-in for overpayment

[Tim Quinn]

Hi, Geert.

Thanks for the response, and sorry about the earlier block.

My sequence-of-events is slightly different from what you summarized, but I’m not sure the difference is significant for this discussion.

Anyway, just to be horribly and boringly complete in case it does make a difference, here is my overall workflow involving these prepayments:

A first-time client attends a session.

1. Create the new customer record representing the new client.
2. Create an invoice for the new customer at the non-discounted rate.
3. Post the invoice.
4. Pay the invoice with the exact amount. No prepayment (yet).

At some time later, the client decides to opt for a prepaid group of discounted sessions. As a good-will gesture, we retroactively consider the first session to be part of the group of discounted sessions, which essentially means we have overcharged (and the client has overpaid) for that first session.

4. Create a new job for that client representing the group of sessions being purchased together.
5. Create a credit memo, associated with that job, for the overpayment — the difference between the normal rate and the discounted rate.

(I should probably go back and associate the earlier invoice with this new job, but I’m too lazy to do that because IIRC it would involve unposting the invoice, editing the job field, reposting the invoice, and repaying the invoice. I do not really do anything with the job association — no reporting, etc..  I’m not even sure why I still bother creating the job except out of fear that, some day, I will discover a good use for it.)

When the client comes for the next session (typically with payment for the remainder of the discounted package):

6. Create a new invoice associated with the earlier-created job.
7. Post the invoice.
8. Pay the invoice. On the payment screen I select the invoice I just created, the credit memo I created earlier, and fill in the payment amount. 

GnuCash at that point automatically calculates and fills in the refund amount.

I have not tried the auto-pay feature. I will give that a try.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading and thanks for the suggestion.

- Tim

> On Mar 27, 2019, at 3:25 AM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> Hi Tim,
> 
> I had sent this before but my mail was blocked by your hosting provider. I'll now resend to list 
> only, perhaps this will reach you. To all others, sorry for the double post.
> 
> Op dinsdag 26 maart 2019 17:50:58 CET schreef Tim Quinn:
>> Hi, all. I’m running GC Build ID: 3.4+ (2018-12-30) on Mac (High Sierra).
>> 
>> My wife offers clients a discount if they pay for several tutoring sessions
>> in advance.
>> 
>> When I process the payment (which exceeds the first session’s invoice
>> amount), GnuCash always computes and fills in the “Refund” amount with the
>> excess payment.
>> 
>> This is never what I want, so I always have to clear out the Refund field
>> manually before proceeding.
>> 
>> I have not found a preference setting to control this behavior, nor did I
>> find anything in the mailing list archive. Have I missed it?
>> 
>> Clearly this is not a huge problem, but it’s a frequent mild annoyance I
>> would like to avoid if I could.
> 
> Hi Tim,
> 
> Just to be sure I understand correctly what's happening:
> 
> So you have at some point used the Process Payment window to enter a 
> prepayment for a customer.
> That at some point later you write the first invoice for that customer.
> As the customer has already paid in advance you'd now like to link part of the 
> prepayment to that invoice.
> If you use the process payment window to do so (by selecting both the 
> prepayment and the invoice) it will fill the Refund field.
> 
> When doing this manually it will always fill that field indeed. The only way I 
> have  found to avoid this is to configure gnucash to automatically pay 
> invoices on posting. You can enable this via
> Edit->Preferences->Business->(Invoices)Process Payments on Posting
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Geert
> 
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