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

[Adrien Monteleone]

That would likely work, but then you can’t use the business features. Everything has to be manual.

The ‘one Accounts Receivable account’ is what the Business Features uses.

And you can certainly easily report by customer using it. There are reports specifically built to work that way.

Creating individual accounts just for individual reporting is making a mess just to achieve what you can already do. (the OP’s case involves importing some but not all history using the Business Features, a fresh book wouldn’t have this problem)

Regards,
Adrien

> On Oct 16, 2019 w42d289, at 9:42 AM, Stan Brown <the_stan_brown at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> 
> 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.