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

[James Thorpe]

I didn't want to create invoices at all because
a) I didn't want to duplicate documents that existed in a different financial period
b) I didn't want to create entries in the Income:Sales table because these entries show up in the Trial Balance report even if they're not in the current financial period.

So what I was after was a way to create opening balance entries in Accounts Receivable that also tied to a particular customer so they'd be picked up in the various Customer Reports.

It seems this is not possible so I've settled for creating the invoices as duplicates but "fixing" b) by also creating journal entries in "Opening Balances" that cancel the entries in the Income:Sales

Provided I do that before the begining of my financial period start, all reports look correct.

Thanks
James
---

Adrien wrote...


  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 2019/10/15 18:00, gnucash-user-request at gnucash.org wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
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>     1.  How to set a customer "opening balance" for the Customer
>        Report (James Thorpe)
>     2. Re:  How to set a customer "opening balance" for the Customer
>        Report (Adrien Monteleone)
>     3. Re:  Error message (RICHARD YENTZER)
>     4. Re:  Incactive Customer in Customer List (Proberts042)
>     5. Re:  Incactive Customer in Customer List (Adrien Monteleone)
>     6. Re:  Gnucash on MacOs Catalina (Kees Blom)
>     7. Re:  Gnucash on MacOs Catalina (John Ralls)
>     8.  Gnucash 3.7-1 (Chris Tsuji)
>     9. Re:  Gnucash 3.7-1 (Adrien Monteleone)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 20:49:53 +0200
> From: James Thorpe<James at fusionsystems.co.za>
> To: GnuCash users group<gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
> Subject: [GNC] How to set a customer "opening balance" for the
> 	Customer Report
> Message-ID:<02aeab3e-e0aa-8b70-7625-110c46862af6 at fusionsystems.co.za>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
>
> 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
061 476 2775
James at fusionsystems.co.za