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

[Adrien Monteleone]

> On Oct 16, 2019 w42d289, at 2:11 PM, James Thorpe <James at fusionsystems.co.za> wrote:
> 
> 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.

I don’t know of any such wizardry either. The Business Features can’t 'see' manual transactions. As Opening Balances aren’t a payment, there’s no way to get them to recognize this. (what would you assign it to?)

Maybe (I haven’t tried) you could use Process Payment to make the entry (rather than make it manually and doing an ‘Assign’) and set the amount as negative, which would effectively create a debit to AR, and assign it to the customer. You might also be able to put "Balance Forward" or some such in the Memo field in the Process Payment dialog. But then when that customer starts making payments, I don’t know if you could ‘apply’ them properly to that Balance Forward or if they’d all just float un-linked forever. That might be worth a little trial though.

I suspect however if you try to enter a negative payment it will flip to the ‘refund’ box and not work.

On that line of thought, you might be able to ‘abuse’ Credit Notes with reversed amounts posted to the Equity:Opening Balance account (if it will let you), you might then be able to assign future payments against the ’negative’ credit note. This wouldn’t be much different from entering an invoice though, so likely not worth the hassle.

But I still think just entering invoices, either individually or as an aggregate is the way to go. (and this is a good Enhancement Request as it is missing from the app currently)


> 
> 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.

Will it let you post to Equity:Opening Balances instead of Income? If so, that should remove the need for those correcting entries.

> 
> 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.


I think the ‘Close Book’ feature only zeros out the Income and Expense accounts. It shouldn’t affect Assets, Liabilities, and other than closing Income and Expense to Equity:Retained Earnings, shouldn’t affect Equity otherwise.

Closing books wouldn’t therefore touch your AR/AP accounts.

Regards,
Adrien