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

[Geert Janssens]

Op woensdag 16 oktober 2019 21:37:45 CEST schreef 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?)
> 
You'd assign it to the Opening Balance account.

> 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.
> 
This is the way to go IMO. Create the opening balance as a refund (via Process 
Payment) for each customer with an opening balance. Future customer payments 
can be "applied" to this opening balance "refund".

As an aside you can apply payments and credit notes against either invoices or 
refunds as you see fit, so applying a payment against an earlier refund is 
perfectly fine.

Note as gnucash doesn't know anything about special opening balances for 
customers it will present these payments as just that - payments. So there 
will be a "Pre-Payment" note in the payment window for your opening balance 
"payment" as well. For your own convenience I recommend indeed to add a Memo 
to this opening balance "payment" as Adrien already suggests.

Final note, if you have customers that had a positive balance (that is paid 
you more than you invoiced them), you obviously have to apply the inverse 
logic. For those customers you need to create a "payment" opening balance 
instead of a "refund" opening balance.

> I suspect however if you try to enter a negative payment it will flip to the
> ‘refund’ box and not work.
> 
That's just a visual inconvenience, internally a refund and a negative payment 
are the same thing.

> 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.
> 
These inherit the same limitation as invoices in that you can't transfer to 
the opening balance.

Regards,

Geert