[GNC] How to set a customer "opening balance" for the Customer Report

[Adrien Monteleone]

Delete the opening balance transaction to get you back to zero.

Then two options:

1. Create a single invoice with the balance forward and post it as of the original ‘opening balance’ date.

2. If the balance forward is from multiple invoices, import them into GnuCash, either with their real dates, or all dated as of the ‘opening balance’ date.

Apply payment(s) as they come in.

The advantage to #2 using real dates is you preserve the aging data and tracking of individual invoices vs. payments.

This can result in a bit of a mess for affected account balances with old history that you’ll have to make correcting transactions for so that your other ‘opening balances’ work out properly.

If you date them all on the same ‘opening balance’ date, you eliminate that extra work, can still track payments vs. invoices, but lose the aging tracking.

A twist on option 2 is to create separate consolidated invoices for the various aging amounts (one for 30, one for 60, one for 90 days etc.) this will still preserve aging info, and will reduce the amount of correcting transactions needed, but won’t eliminate them entirely.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Oct 14, 2019 w42d287, at 1:49 PM, James Thorpe <James at fusionsystems.co.za> wrote:
> 
> Hi All
> 
> My financial year started on 1st March 2019. My customer at that stage, owed 67,765.23.
> 
> I tried to seed this amount in my Equity:Opening Balances account with the corresponding account being Assets:Accounts Receivable. This seemed like a sensible way of opening the accounts.
> 
> However, because I don't have the invoice in the system, when the payment comes in, if "assign as payment" and select the customer, then the payment is associated with the customer but the opening balance is not so the customer starts 67,765.23 in credit.
> 
> I could, of course, just not associate the payment with the customer, and then my AR account should balance but my customer report will just not include this detail.
> 
> Is there any way I can have an opening balance that I can associate with a customer... the same way I would with an invoice? I don't want to create an invoice because that would duplicate a document from another system.
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> thanks
> 
> -- 
> --
> James Thorpe