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

[Adrien Monteleone]

Also, the Opening Balance entry *is* editable, even in 2.6.x. I’ve done it myself. It is just a regular transaction.

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.
> 
> 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
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