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

[Stan Brown]

It sounds like you have just one Accounts Receivable account, and you
put all customers' invoices in that one account. I hope I'm
misinterpreting you, because I think that would make it a lot harder
down the road to run reports by customer. I'll assume you have one
account for each customer, all under a placeholder account Accounts
Receivable.

If you do, then you can specify an opening balance when you create each
customer's account. Unfortunately, as far as I can discover, if you
didn't do that at the time you created the account, you can't add it
later because the "opening balance" field in the account dialog is not
editable. (I have GC 2.x, so this lack may have been fixed in GC 3.x).

However, I believe it's possible to accomplish the same thing by
creating a transaction of this form, dated the day before the beginning
of your first GC accounting period:

Debit: AR:Customer 1 - Balance forward x.xx
Debit: AR:Customer 2 - Balance forward y.yy
Debit: AR:Customer 3 - Balance forward z.zz
  (and so forth)
Credit:Equity

That sets up your opening balances for customers that have them. I think
the credit properly goes to Equity, not to Income, because this is a
snapshot of how things are at a moment in time.

The one thing I don't know, because I frankly can't understand how
reconciliation works in GC, is whether that would cause you trouble in
future reconciliations.

On 2019-10-16 09:32, James Thorpe wrote:
> 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.
-- 
Regards,
Stan Brown
Tompkins County, New York, USA
https://BrownMath.com
http://OakRoadSystems.com