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

[James Thorpe]

Thanks for the responses.

Stan:  I had not considered creating separate AR accounts for each 
customer. That may be a wise thing to do although it seems the business 
features track the customer payments etc fine if all are in the same AR 
account provided.... you use the Invoice/ Payment mechanism to create 
the entries.

However, I just tested doing that with a dummy set of accounts and while 
you can set the opening balance in that way, because the opening balance 
is not linked to the customer in the business features, it doesn't show 
on the "Customer Report". To get it to show there may require some more 
trickery of some sort. You can "assign as payment" but I don't know any 
other way of doing it.

Christopher: Thanks for the link to the business feature issure 
regarding a warning about creating AR entries directly. I'll steer clear 
of that.

The way I've done it seems to work best for my purposes - actually 
create the invoices in the system (duplicate) and then use the 
Equity:Opening Balances journal entries to clear the Income accounts 
prior to the start of the accounting period.

Incidentally, for those like myself who like to start a new set of books 
each financial year, this is a way to intialise the accounts. (Rather 
onerous, I know, but otherwise my accounts just get too messy because I 
change the way I do things from year to year as I slowly grasp this 
accounting thing.

thanks again
James


On 2019/10/16 18:00, gnucash-user-request at gnucash.org 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.


-- 
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James Thorpe
061 476 2775
James at fusionsystems.co.za